#u really have to look at citizen as a legal/political class when ur looking at ancient times

[terriblelifechoices]

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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