#Danny is delighted to have more friends and he's not the oldest Or the youngest so yay!

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 84

Amity Park absolutely adores her little ghostling, her little Gatekeeper who was of her own ectoplasm, reborn from her own blood in the center of her new heart. She absolutely adores her baby, practically a newborn, being only a year dead! 

So of course she had to gush and boast about her little phantom to the other city spirits! They all got together to gossip sometimes after all. And both Smallville and Fawcett started to gush about their own little ones back! 

Gosh they should set up a playdate at some point, her little phantom could use some friends in the mortal realm. Well some more friends, three is obviously not enough. Oh, Gotham and Bludhaven have come over as well! It’s a playdate then! 

Now if only each of their world’s timelines were synced up, but at least everyone is around the same age! 

[starlitangels]

Some More Stuff About My Pups

Natalie remembers Caelum. Only vaguely but she still has images of him in her mind and she can still hear his laughter. Mind you, she thinks they’re the imaginings of a child playing with their imaginary friend, but she remembers him

It is not uncommon for sleepovers between Danny, Micah, and Natalie to end with whomever’s parents coming downstairs in the morning to find Danny curled up on the cushion pile on the floor between two fairly large she-wolves

Sam used to sing Micah to sleep when she was a baby. She would always fall right to sleep with “Here Comes the Sun,” so Sam took to calling her little darlin’ when she was a baby. Which Darlin’ found adorable

At their fully grown, the Pups measure in at:

Gabriel - 6′5″ (yeah, he’s tall)

Natalie - 5′4″

Evelyn - 5′10″

Lily - 5′5″

Danny - 5′7″

Micah - 5′8″

In oldest-to-youngest birth order,

Lily’s birthday is July 26th

Evelyn’s birthday is December 3rd

Gabriel’s birthday is May 9th

Natalie’s birthday is November 12th

Danny’s birthday is June 19th

Micah’s birthday is September 4th

Danny, despite having a personality similar to Milo’s and hating being scared (much to Lily’s delight, given she’s as playful as Sweetheart), has found a lot of enjoyment in scaring the crap out of Micah and Natalie. But only because they’re his two best friends and they are both hard to scare

Caelum was in the clearing the day David made Natalie beta of the pack. He was also there when both kids shifted for the first time, when Gabriel was initially appointed beta, and the days Davey and Angel brought both kids home

Caelum was so deeply integrated into Natalie’s childhood joy that she still sees flickers of his smile when she’s happy

When Natalie was a baby, Davey and Angel thought she cried herself to sleep a lot when she woke up in the middle of the night. But the baby monitor could never pick up on Caelum soothing her back to sleep

Some music tastes:

Natalie and Micah like alternative a lot

Gabriel and Natalie dig classic rock

Danny loves jazz

Lily pretends to like country music to piss off Danny. Lily actually also likes jazz

Evelyn is a big fan of pop punk. She and Micah will listen to metal covers of Disney songs together if they hang out

Some DnD since I haven’t talked about them playing it in a while:

Natalie’s the dice goblin. She has so many dice. Someone doesn’t know what to get her for her birthday? Dice. Stumped for solstice? Dice. Just find a cool set of dice no matter what kind and she will be delighted.

She plays the party’s chaotic stupid rogue

Gabriel plays a paladin, who has unilaterally decided that he’s said rogue’s parole officer

Gabriel’s paladin shares healing duty with Danny’s cleric which is good because

Micah’s barbarian has an intelligence of 5 and a wisdom of 8, and Micah loves roleplaying the hell out of that

Evelyn set out to play a stereotypical bard, but her character ended up being the group parent

Gabriel only beat Natalie manifesting powers by six months. He manifested when he was barely thirteen, and she manifested when she was barely twelve, maybe even a week or two before her twelfth birthday, and they’re only eighteen months apart.

William Solaire taught Micah and Rosalind French while the girls were growing up (and still does twice-weekly lessons as schedules permit), so when the girls want to have a private conversation around their parents or the other Shaw Pack pups, they drop into French (and, yes, absolutely smack talk the other pups)

[bibliocratic]

I was going to write this for the Aspec Archives week, but I got overexcited, so here we are. 

AU: Mythical creatures. OG Archive team. 

Some CWs apply, see tags. 

The sea is more than water, her elder brethren taught her, warned her, chided her. It is home and harm and hungry, and you should not face it alone. Her siblings were older, ever knowing better, boisterous and boasting braver, but even they worried, scolded and fretted when she swam out too far alone into deep waters.

It will love you, but it will not always be kind, her eldest sibling bit out, snapped to mask their anxiety. There can be no bearings, in the deep-deep down, no anchors to denote where the sky lies.

When her people sleep, they rest wedged into some secure rock or crevice, tails looped around tails so no one is lost while dreaming.

You cannot be a shoal of one, my dearest, my youngest and bravest, the oldest of their shoal had said, when she told her she was planning on taking the rising when the waters warmed. Ascending landward on the tide swell, letting the shimmering scales of her tail split into skin.

She had not used the name Sasha at that time because that was a landward name she chose with care. Her folk gather names like a garland of pearls, to be constantly strung longer through life as age advances them; names for qualities, for momentous events, for hopes and desires. Her first name, gifted by her shoal, was guttural. It starts at the back of her throat, trails off into a susurration through gills. Mer is a difficult language to learn, though not impossible.

Tim tried. There is no one singular language of those who skirt the deepwaters, so he attempts to mimic her dialect. His pronunciation stumbling, he makes tentative sentences with the butchered grammar of fry. Martin’s grammar is even worse, though he picks up the eddies and waves of the sounds easier.

Jon, like most things in life, takes it as a challenge. One day, almost stubborn with nerves, to perform his task to perfection, he pushes out a juvenile approximation of her first name. Clipped and textbook and the stress in the wrong places, but Sasha smiles, showing her sharpest teeth in delight. Instructs him where to hold the hum at the back of his throat, how to roll the third phoneme upwards like an air bubble. Jon repeats it and repeats it, quietly smug and pleased at his achievement, and the sea in her soul rocks fondly at the sight.

She broached landward in the rising two moons after her age of maturation. She was one of a handful to come to shore. A sibling in Brighton who she phones every week, another two in Holyhead. Her first shoal traverses to warmer waters when the season shifts, and she would feel the rock-hollow absence of them if it was not for Tim, inviting her to participate in a hundred-and-one inane activities that keep her from feeling swept out; Jon, with his libraries of questions and intrigues, his quick-silver tongue; Martin, who sometimes swims a little further out from them but who finds her small knick-knacks in charity shops and craft markets and leaves them on her desk for no reason other than he has thought of her.

She makes three necklaces, plain with a strong chain, a single pearl attached. And on a day where her folk traditionally string garlands of seaweed and mangrove roots and colourful plants from coral reefs in a celebration of family –  there is no one word in her language for this idea; it poorly translates into hierarchies like sibling and brethren and elders, but these are not concepts that fit it exactly – she gifts them to the shoal that will anchor her in the depths of the sea, and bestows upon them names. Most Mer names are wishes for quick fins, calm waters, safe shores, and so she wishes these for them in a language they are not quite proficient in yet.

Her landward shoal is smaller than is traditional. But she loves them as treasures of her heart, and thinks she understands what her siblings told her, about anchors.

--

His parents, both harpies from local nests, are perplexed when his wings start coming in.

Must be a colouring from your mum’s side, his dad hums thoughtfully when Tim’s primaries grow in long and shining like struck bronze. He runs a careful finger down the central line of the rachis, and the wing shudders and jumps, the feathers still sensitive, and Tim complains that it’s ticklish. His wings are too small to fly away as his dad dives in, captures him in careful arms, corkscrewing upwards a little off the ground with Tim squirming and squealing and squawking in play, but they flutter and flap nonetheless.

The wing span’s from your dad’s side, no-one from my nest ever went more than five foot, his mother says, rubbing at the dark brown of his downy secondaries. Tim stretches them out wide, eager to boast at their length, the tips of his longest feathers reaching past his arms held out wide.

Danny’s wings are smaller. Magpie like, bold lines of white broken up by blue and black, the same as his parents. Tim’s wings, broader, a colour like beaten brass that tips into gold at the ends, draws attention, but he’s never been embarrassed. His family never treated him differently, so he didn’t dwell on it.

He can fly, though he doesn’t often. After his parents died, and after… after Danny, he moved to London, where there’s tighter airspace regulations and permits involved, so he mostly doesn’t bother. This doesn’t mean never, however. He has learned, while working in the Archives, that from the ground, his wings have enough lift to pick up both Jon and Sasha by at least a foot. He thinks he could probably manage Martin as well, if it wasn’t for the unfortunate fact that Martin is mildly allergic to a whole host of things, including feather dander, meaning he gets a bit watery eyed whenever he gets too close to Tim’s wings, and he’s a sniffing, red-eyed mess come  moulting season.

Anyway, he can always fly when he leaves the city. When it’s been too long since Sasha’s scales touched seawater, she invites him out to the coast. Jon apparently has had enough of the coast to last a lifetime, and Martin gets funny about large bodies of water, so it’s often the two of them. She swims out, the greenish scales of her tail catching the sun-struck water, and he, above, feeling the breeze brush through his cramped wings, follows her wake. When she breaches the surface in a playful arc, he swoops down, trying to catch her at the same time as she tries to splash him.

“You never thought to look into it?” Jon asks. Always brewing with questions. Tim is obligingly holding out one of his wings, and Jon, who takes everything like a project, has books out and webpages up but with no further clue as to why his colouration and span differ so from his parents.

Tim shrugs. “Doesn’t matter really, does it?”

Jon hums, clearly not agreeing, and Sasha rolls her eyes fondly,  and that is the end of that.

-

Marysia had hoped her child would not take after her husband. She’d lit candles and attended masses during her pregnancy, worn the beads of her rosary smooth. Her child had been born on land, miles from shore, and her husband had been a grounded man, who had folded up his pelt on their wedding night for her and swore to wear no other soul than his human one.

But then her husband leaves, the box where he kept his second soul empty, and Martin is eight years old, and he wakes up one morning glassy-eyed and complaining of nausea, his lip bleeding from where his sharpening teeth have ripped the skin, and she knows her prayers were not answered.

It is not unknown, for the second soul of some folk to flourish later. But it is a rough awakening, to have one’s body grow a new skin out of itself, and Martin is off school for over a week, riddled with fever and fervour, constantly parched, crying and sweating out salt-water.

She watches his skin prickle with grey and black fur, blotching with white over his stomach as he coils up under his covers, throws them off only for his limbs to reduce to shivering. His brown eyes have gone black-shot, his cries a mix of language and barks, and Marysia fears she will lose her only child to the sea.

It will be hard for him to fit in, she tells herself. It would be best to choose one, and he has his friends and family and her on land, and who knows where his father is now, and surely it would be cruel, an unnecessary agony for him to endure some other foreign pull away from all he knows.

She does what she thinks is a kindness, though that is neither excuse nor forgiveness. After nine days, his fur has come through, sleek and soft, his whiskers twitching, and she helps him peel it off as one would do clothes, revealing sweat-sheened limbs, his eyes slipped back into brown again. His gaze still distant and feverish, he tries to cuddle into her, and she soothes him while she finishes stripping off his pelt and folding it neatly.

While he sleeps, she burns it in a fire in the back yard.

When he comes back to himself, she lies and tells him that he’s been sick with a bad fever. And he trusts her, and never questions it. He doesn’t understand that she’s burnt a part of him up, scattered the ashes to the winds, but it was for the right reasons. To keep him safe, and happy, and with her.

He grows up human-limbed and cloven-souled, and she never tells him the truth.

--

Sasha floats in an ever-dark, stolen away and hidden. There is a knot, a cage-trap around her legs, which have fused into her tail although there is no water. The sea, far away, like the wail in a conch shell, throbs in her soul as she strains and shouts and snarls in the wrapping of spider’s webs.

The sea is the only thing with her in the dark.

Sound has a particular quality, underwater. She hears it first, an echo that shivers through her, like being thrummed on the backdraft of some shallow wave. And then it is a wash of insistence. A command.

The compulsion uses her names, landward and seaward and it pulls and demands her attention, and she shrieks and cries back, struggling in the depths. She is being called home, up up up to breach the surface, and she cannot help but answer.

There is a crack and the sea splits, and she is choking on cold and dusty air.

“Sasha!” someone is saying. “God, is she – she’s not – ?”

“Get that stuff off her, come on. Sasha. Sash, love, can you hear us?”

A series of thuds as she splutters. A twisting, gnarling screech, and several swear words.

“Jesus!”

“Shit – shit, get her out of the way.”

“Boss, move, give me the – ”

The screech degrades into a glitching, warping scream. There is the multi-layered sound of compressed air, and crackling fire,the woosh and stench of something burning.

In time, she cracks her eyes open to the punch of light. Her tail flaps weakly. Someone is pulling great strands of silk that has clumped like poorly soldered iron around her limbs, making visceral noises of disgust. She’s cold-stream shivering, surrounded by broken wood and chippings.

“Hey, hey, we got you. We got you. You with us, Sash?”

The faint scratch of feathers against her cheek. Furnace-warm arms are holding her.

Jon is kneeling down in front of her. Holding an axe and stinking of smoke, and she knows, she knows, that it was his voice she heard, although she doesn’t yet understand why.

Martin throws a blanket over her as she shivers, her tail shrivelling and bisecting into legs. He has silk in his hair, and his fingers are trembling, but his face is broken with a look of such relief.

“It’s you,” he says, and his hand touches at his throat, at the necklace she made for him. “It’s you. It’s really you.”

It’s Martin in the end that carries her out of the tunnels, tucking the blanket completely around her. He is talking in the scatter-gun way he does when he is anxious, babbling, and she can’t bring herself to listen. He smells of soot and saltwater, and she’s never noticed that before.

She falls asleep, curled up into his hold, drained and shaken, but feeling utterly safe.  

--

Jon is human. Completely, one hundred percent, although Sasha had joked once that way way back there must have been some Spinx in the family. Tim’s long suspected that Martin’s not quite human, no matter how he presents, but that’s Martin’s business, not his. Some folks have lineages that are rare, or mistrusted, or misunderstood, and Tim’s not one to pry.

Jon, though. Human through and through. Which is why he’s so worried.

“I shouldn’t have been able to do that,” Jon says. Martin’s with Sasha, making sure there’s no nasty side effects to her imprisonment in the table. Jon’s had a face on him for a while which means he’s Worrying with a capital W, and it’s taken hours for him to untangle himself into a blustered declaration to the rest of the class, spiked with nerves. “That place, it had her. It shouldn’t have… I don’t know what I did, but I told her to leave, a-and she could. And she shouldn’t have been able to.”

“And you think that you did that?”

“I – I know I did that, Tim, I felt it, o-or. I mean, I felt something!”

“Ok, alright. Alright. Let’s, let’s calm down and look at this logically.”

Jon goes over what he said while they struggled to rescue Sasha from the deep. It was something he said, he’s sure of it, which is why he is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the main archive office space with Tim, his trousers getting dusty and his temper scraping frayed, getting increasingly frustrated when he tries recreating exactly what he did with his voice, going through questions and commands and instructions and inquiries. And while Tim answers, it’s clearly not what Jon’s looking for, and he’s rubbing the hair at the back of his head in the way he does when he’s getting increasingly frustrated and is too bull-headed to walk away.

Then Jon, rolling his eyes and seething in annoyance, asks him a throwaway question, one of many he’s been trying – what’s your favourite colour? (seriously, Jon, that’s what you’re going with?!); What did you do at the weekend? (you know what I did, you and Martin were with me!).

“Why did you join the Magnus Institute?”

They both sit, frozen and horrified as Tim’s mouth opens and his words trip over his tongue in their eagerness to leave his mouth. As his eyes grow wide and water with tears as he cannot stop speaking about Danny, about the Covent Garden circus and Joseph Grimaldi. As Jon sits, ramrod-backed and cannot stop listening, a muscle jumping in his jaw.  His expression wars between frantic and panicking and hungry.

Tim feels wrung out and hollow once he’s finished. Jon’s manic with apologies. It takes both of them a long time to calm down.

“Maybe… maybe you’re a siren or something?” Tim suggests, but Jon is shaking his head.

“It’s this place, Tim. It’s those statements, when I read them. It’s … I – I think they’re doing something to me.”

Tim looks at Jon and the light strikes off his eyes in a way that it shouldn’t on a human.

He touches Jon’s arm.

“We’ll sort this,” he promises. “We got Sasha out, didn’t we? The four of us, we can get to the bottom of this, yeah?”

Jon nods, and gives a small fragile thanks, and that’s human enough for Tim.

--

Marysia told herself she was not a bad mother. That her son was simply a hard child to love, that he had all the worst trappings of his father, his brown eyes perpetually caught with a far-away look that doesn’t know where to place its longing. But even as she sickened, and he sloughed off every facet of himself in a pathetic attempt to please her, she couldn’t find anything but sorrow in her heart to look upon the man grown over familiar in face, a growth that grew deep-set and fungal into contempt.

She almost spat the truth out to him. Once or twice, with the thought that confessing might bring them closer. She wished he’d chosen the sea instead, so she wouldn’t have to look upon her amputated, half-formed child who would always be lost.

But she never did.

And Martin finds out alone, cornered in an unlocked office, his hands dropping the lighter as a thousand eyes open and watch satisfied as they pour his mother’s choices down his throat to choke him.

--

It starts when Martin starts sleeping in archive storage. When Tim watches worms burrow into Jon’s skin at the same time as they latch and gnaw and wriggle under his own. When they get Sasha back, and find Gertrude’s corpse and Jon leaves and gets hurt and hurt and hurt again, and the world around them gets smaller and meaner and there is nothing Tim can do.

He takes to storing food in their desk drawers. Nothing that will go off, or won’t keep. Tins and dried goods and non-perishables. He lines the walls of Martin’s storage room with fire extinguishers of different types, fire blankets, and spare first aid kits bulging with plasters and bandages and antiseptic wipes. He buys blankets and pillows and rope and penknives. He stress-moults constantly, and tucks his feathers out of sight, irritated and embarrassed at the sight of them,  and it occurs to him that nesting is not a healthy way to deal with this.

He wants his family safe. He used to think it was such a small thing to ask for.

He thinks about that when the bomb goes off.

He burns, and he is dying.

His rage and fear burn off into a different fury. That it has come to this, his family so threatened, that all he has to his name is his sorrow and trauma and frustration and vengeance.

Tim wants nothing more than to live. To see them safe. To rail and rage against what seeks to harm them. So he burns and he burns and burns, his wings aflame and his mouth twisted in a scream, and does not die.

They dig him out breathing from the rubble. His skin stained grey with ash and soot.

His new wings stretch out red as the sunset.

[evening-starlight]

Daddy’s Best Friend

All Works Master List

DBF Master List

7

Word Count: 1021

    Tom looked painfully beautiful in the black, form-fitting suit. His hair was slicked back, but his curls still held their form and framed his angelic face. Amaris shouldn't be thinking these things with her boyfriend next to her, but she couldn't stop looking at Tom.

    Amaris truly wasn't a kid anymore, Tom realizes for what feels like the millionth time since she came home. She looks like a confident young lady who wore a simple dress with purpose and perfection. It dropped just above her mid-thigh and hugged the perfect places to show off her lovely hourglass figure.  

    "Bonjour, Tommy," Amaris greets, trying to act like everything was normal and she wasn't having these conflicting feelings. She loved Armel, she did, but he wasn't Tom.

    Tom pulls Amaris into a quick hug before shaking Armel's hand. "Pleasure to see you again, Armel," Tom greets, fake smile plastered on his face. "Where's your father?"

    "I thought you had him last?" Amaris jokes, smiling as Tom chuckles. "I don't know; I just got here. He said we could get the table if we get here before him." Tom approaches the hostess with the young couple in tow, smiling that dazzling smile that could make any woman swoon.

    They sit down at the table, Amaris between the two men, by the time Will and the other two kids find their way to the back table. Armel grips Amaris's hand tightly, suddenly nervous about having a formal meeting with his girlfriend's family.

    Amaris could barely think, her head dancing with so many thoughts that by the time she processed one, three more were coming at her. Tom was to her left, smiling and laughing with the rest of the family. He was part of that family. They all adopted him as a member, and Amaris didn't want to ruin that relationship with her family.

    Armel was to her right, holding her hand and telling silly stories of Paris shenanigans. To say she was torn was an understatement. Amaris wasn't torn; she was already split. That kiss with Tom may not have meant anything to him, but to Amaris, it's everything she dreamt about for years. But Armel treats her so well. He treats her like a queen and always has.

    The waitress comes over, greeting the table with a bright customer service smile. She introduces herself as Alex and asks the usual question of what she can get us. The Clarke siblings all look at each other, Amaris hoping she gains a point.

    "A million dollars?" William jokes, causing Juno to wrinkle their nose. The oldest and youngest are now tied in points. Amaris does a silent celebration as she pulls out her phone to give herself a point while Armel giggles.

    "Mr. Clarke, you jokester." Alex teases. She's waited on Will multiple times, and every time she does, it's the same joke, but a generous tip is always left. William laughs and continues his usual drink order of whiskey on ice.

    Dinner seems to last forever to Amaris. Armel gets along swimmingly with her family, causing everyone to laugh and share the embarrassing stories they have with Amaris, much to her dismay. Tom laughed along, hoping no one can notice how forced it is.

    Tom wanted to leave the more he watched how lovesick Armel was with Amaris. He called her stupid pet names and smiled like an idiot when he looked at her. But Tom can't blame the latter. Tom can't help but smile when Amaris has her attention on him.

    "Oh my God," Danica exclaims, pulling both adults out of their thoughts. Amaris missed some of the conversations, having been lost in counting down the minutes until she can leave. "Did you know Mari had braces?"

    "Danny, I promise I am not afraid to jump across this table to strangle you if you show Armel shit," Amaris threatens. She wasn't secretive about her awkward pre-teens, but they weren't something she boasted about. Danica smiles mischievously and reaches for her phone. "I hate you," Amaris groans as Danica hands Armel her cellphone.

    On the screen is a picture of twelve-year-old Amaris smiling brightly with her braced teeth while holding a baby crocodile at the Australia Zoo. Armel laughs and then coes at the photo. "Adorable." Amaris hides her face in Armel's shoulder, making him laugh harder and rest a hand on her knee. "You were an adorable child, Mon Amour."

    "Shut up," Amaris whines, causing the table to laugh again.

    Tom remembered that picture. She was so excited to show him she got to hold a crocodile that she texted the photo to him right away, addressing him as Uncle Tom. That's all he was to her. Her adopted uncle. An adult figure that shouldn't be having these feelings for her, so why does he?

    He felt disgusted with himself for thinking the immoral things he was. How beautiful she'd look with her dress on his floor or how ethereal she'd sound with his name in her mouth. Tom takes a long drink of alcohol in front of him, drowning the thoughts in the liquid.

    It wasn't until dessert that Amaris noticed the change in Tom's demeanor. He stopped faking and slowly backed out of the conversation, focusing on his creme brulee. She leans over, whispering, "Are you okay? You kind of shut down, Tommy." Tommy. That fucking name makes his heart both soar in delight and sink in disgust with himself.

    He forces a smile just for her and replies, "Lovely, darling. Just a tad tired, I think." Amaris gives a small smile and rests a hand on his shoulder.

    "Thank you for coming. I really appreciate you putting effort into knowing Armel." Maybe it was a little backhanded, but Amaris wanted to get a rise out of Tom. She wanted to see if that kiss wasn't as drunk as he told her he was.

    Tom sniffles an annoyed sigh and kisses the girl's forehead tenderly. "Of course, darling. I'm really enjoying it," He says, trying his best to convey his disappointment.

    Neither one could wait for this night to be over.

Taglist: @queenofallhobos​ @kingtwhiddleston​ @cynic-spirit​

[terriblelifechoices]

💖 Send this to 10 other bloggers that you think are wonderful. Keep the game going, make someone smile! 💖 (💖 have a lovely day!💖) ---- Sending back to u because I think ure wonderful!

Likewise, my friend.  You’re a constant delight.

You mentioned wanting to see more of the Hughes siblings, so here is some completely self-indulgent fic.  I had a lot of fun with the swearing.

Some context, from Nothing Shall Be Impossible:

“Win?”

“It’s the only thing she’ll answer to, outside of Hughes,” Percival told him. “Her full name is Winifred Hughes. Her parents died when she was small, so her oldest brothers pretty much raised her. Win’s got five older brothers and one younger. Ezra and Miles didn’t know much about raising little boys, much less little girls, so the youngest four grew up … a little wild. It explains a lot about her personality, really.”

Percival liked her personality. Credence could tell. Percival wouldn’t have sounded nearly so amused if he wasn’t secretly fond of Win Hughes’ persuasive brand of crazy.

“I have no idea where her vocabulary came from,” Percival sighed. “Hughes could make a sailor blush.”

“An Auror,” Ezra repeated.

An Auror, of all the fucking things.  Merlin’s hairy wrinkled scrotum.  An Auror.

Win raised her chin and narrowed her eyes at him, radiating defiance.  “What’s wrong with being an Auror?” she demanded.  “It’s a good job.  The hours are shit, but the pay is good.  It’s stable,” she added, using the word as an invocation.  Win was too little to really remember the bad years just after Mom and Dad died, but she wasn’t blind to its aftereffects.  Stability – financial or otherwise – had just been a pretty dream, then.  Stable was the Hughes family watchword, their invocation, their prayer.  Stable meant a little patch of the world that no one could disrupt or take away.  Stable meant food on the table and clothes on their backs and not worrying about whether or not having one meant going without the other.  Stable was everything they’d dreamed about when they were young.

“There’s more to life than stable, Win,” Ezra told her, feeling vaguely blasphemous and more than a little heartbroken.  He wanted more for his siblings than what he’d had.  “If you’re just signing up for the paycheck –”

“Fuck yourself,” Win interrupted, flushed red with rage.  “I’m not, okay?  I’m not you.”

Ezra felt the words like a slap.  It would have hurt less if she’d slapped him, he thought.  Having his failures thrown in his face like that hurt.

“No,” Ezra said.  “You’re not.”

“Ez,” Win said.  “Ez, I didn’t mean it –”

“Oh, yes you did,” Ezra snapped.  He stopped, swallowing down his angry reply.  They went down like ground glass, an awful raw thickness in his throat it hurt to breathe around.

At eighteen he’d had parents.  At twenty he was one, and he’d taken any job he could to make ends meet.  He worked shifts in No-Maj factories during the day, tended bar in the wizarding part of town at night and ran errands for Gnarlack and his ilk, knowing full well that what he was doing wasn’t legal and telling himself he didn’t have the luxury of principles.  Not with five brothers and a sister to look after.  He slept whenever he could, which wasn’t often, in between work and trying to make sure that Joey and Win and Danny grew up healthy and safe, that Miles and Eddie and Colin were passing all of their classes.  Miles had wanted to drop out, to help, because he was seventeen and thought he was old enough to shoulder some of the burdens.  Ezra hadn’t wanted to let him, and they’d spent the entire summer after the funeral having a series of shouted arguments.  Those invariably ended with slammed doors and hurt feelings.  Things were better between them now, but Ezra had lost his taste for fighting with his siblings years ago.  He wasn’t going to start again now.

“If that’s what you want to do, then you should do it,” he said, measured and calm.

“Ez –”

“No,” he said.  She couldn’t take the words back, and he couldn’t hear her apology.  Not yet. Not while the wound was still raw and new.

Ezra took a deep breath and told her what he’d come here to say.  “I’m proud of you, Win.”

*

Miles stormed into Panacea just after closing.  He had a key, but Ezra had been expecting him, so the door wasn’t locked.

“What the absolute shitting fuck,” said Miles.

“Hello to you to,” Ezra said, wiping down the polished golden oak of Panacea’s bar.

Miles slammed a bottle down on the bar between them and took a seat on one of the stools and pointed an accusing finger at Ezra’s face.  “Don’t play coy with me, you miserable bastard.  I know you too well to fall for it.”

Ezra sighed.  “You’re my brother, not my spouse.  Kindly stop haranguing me like some tentacle fucker’s fishwife.”  He turned the bottle towards himself so that he could read the label, reasonably certain that he already knew what it was.  Miles was a distiller for Philosopher’s Stone Distillery; he rarely brought anything else.  It turned out to be a bottle of Prima Materia, which was the Stone’s brand of vodka.

“Good stuff,” he observed.

“Get us some glasses, yeah?”

“I’m not drinking with you,” Ezra warned, bringing out two shot glasses.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Miles, waving this aside as inconsequential.  He cracked the seal on the bottle and filled both shot glasses.  “Drink up.”

Ezra tossed it back, exhaling just after he swallowed and savoring the light notes of fruit and something floral.  The Stone brewed their vodka from pears, and while it had been distilled until it had no fruit flavor, he fancied he could still taste just a hint of it.

Miles immediately filled his glass again.  “Drink.”

“Are you trying to get me drunk?”

“You gonna fucking talk to me if you’re not?”

Ezra drank.

“She’s really fucking sorry,” Miles said, several shots later.

“I know,” Ezra said.

“She didn’t mean it, either.”

“I know that, too.”

“You still mad?”

“Yes.  No.  I don’t fucking know, I’m drunk,” said Ezra, crossly.  He sighed heavily, snagged the bottle and poured himself another shot.  He sipped this one.  Prima Materia was really too good to waste pounding it back like it was rotgut.  It was meant for sipping.  “I’m not mad at Win, not really, I’m mad that she’s right.  She’s not me.”

“No,” agreed Miles.  “You saw to that.”

“We both did,” Ezra said, muttering the words into his vodka.  Things had gotten a little better after Miles graduated from Ilvermorny.  Eighteen was still too young to help pick up the slack in parenting their younger siblings, but Ezra hadn’t been able to stop him.

“Yeah,” Miles said, gesturing for Ezra to refill his glass.  “We did good, I think.”  He laughed.  “An Auror, though.  Morgana’s tits, you ever think we’d end up with one of those in the family?”

“Fuck, no.  Of course not.”  Ezra was perfectly ordinary law-abiding citizen these days, but he’d done what he had to in order to put food on the table.  They both had.  The fact that neither of them had become fully-fledged petty criminals still surprised him sometimes.

“She’ll probably be good at it,” mused Miles.

Ezra scoffed.  “You kidding me?  She’s gonna be fucking amazing.”  Ezra had never met anyone as fast with their wand as his baby sister.  The Aurors would be lucky to have her.

“You should tell her that,” Miles advised.

“Yeah,” said Ezra.

*

Win was fucking amazing.  It killed Ezra that no one else saw that.

He wondered if this was his fault.  He didn’t know anything about raising little boys, much less little girls, but at least he’d actually been a little boy at some point and had some idea about what made them tick.  Win hadn’t seemed to mind all that much growing up, even if she’d had to get the sex talk and an explanation of her womanly monthlies from Healer Zhong at Ilvermorny rather than her mother.

Win was a round peg in a square hole, and she didn’t care who knew it.  She was incredibly, unbelievably fast with her wand, to say nothing of good at piecing things together from the very faintest of clues.  But she wasn’t polite or diplomatic or anything other than herself, which tended to put people off.

Those people had their brains of twice digested tuna as far as Ezra was concerned, but those people were also in charge, and Win had pissed off enough of them to cripple her chances at a promotion.  Win claimed she didn’t care, but –

Stable, Ezra thought.  Being bounced from department to department after she pissed off a superior officer wasn’t stable, and Win still craved stability.  If she didn’t seem to actually like being an Auror so fucking much, he’d have begged her to quit ages ago.

“So now I’ve been seconded to Covert Magical Investigations,” Win concluded.

“Ah,” said Ezra.  He paused, and then decided that the obvious question really did need to be asked.  “Doesn’t that require, oh, I don’t know, subtlety?”

“Fuck you, I can be subtle,” his sister grumbled.

“Win,” Ezra said patiently, “your default setting is ‘agent of chaos’ and your favorite word is ‘fuck.’  People tend to notice that sort of thing.”

“I’ll fit right in!” Win said cheerfully.  “Fischer wants me undercover with Reckoning’s lot.”

“I’m sorry,” Ezra said.  “I don’t think I heard you correctly, because what I thought I just heard you say was that your assigned department head wants you undercover with motherfucking There-Shall-Be-A-Reckoning Johnson.”

“Er,” said Win, looking somewhat taken aback.  “No, you heard that part right.”

“Motherfucker!” said Ezra.  “No.  No, no, no, and also hell no you are not going anywhere near that psychotic sister-fucking shit weasel!”

Win stared at him.  “So you’ve heard of him,” she said.

“Reckoning is insane.  Actually, literally, godsdamned crazy.  Whatever pox he had on his pathetic pencil dick has rotted its way up the rest of him and scrambled his brain like a motherfucking omelette.  The only reason he still runs a gang is because he scares the shit out of everyone else.  Even the other bosses won’t do business with him.”

“You are strangely informed about New York’s criminal underworld,” Win observed.

“I’m a bartender, Win.  You wouldn’t believe the shit I hear.”  And maybe he kept an ear out for that sort of thing.  Just because he wasn’t a petty criminal didn’t mean he wasn’t paying attention.

“Sure,” said Win, who clearly didn’t believe him.

Well, fuck.  At some point, Ezra was probably going to have to explain some of the things he’d done in the bad years.  He’d really hoped to avoid having that conversation with Win, especially now that she was an Auror.

That was going to be awkward.

Win sighed.  “I’ve got orders, Ez.  I don’t exactly get to pick and choose what orders I follow.”

“Then find a way out of them.  Piss Fischer off.  Hell, I don’t care if you have to seduce his damned wife.  Just stay away from Reckoning.”

“You worry too much,” Win said.  “I’ll be fine.”

She wasn’t.

A/N: Yes, I totally named Win’s brothers after the actors in the Fantastic Beasts cast.  

The Hughes siblings, circa 1926:

Ezra, age 48Miles, age 45Edward, age 43Colin, age 40Joseph, age 37Winifred, age 33Daniel, age 31