f a l l i n g

Danny stood up as quickly as he could at the sound of footsteps down the hall. He was just waking from his nap, so he hadn’t gotten around to annoying the fuck out of the cops with his singing for a few hours. The anti-magic barrier was only a good idea until you couldn’t silencio someone in the holding cell. Even then, Danny knew his rights.

“Hey—HEY!” Danny called out to the figure walking by. He wasn’t sure if she were walking in his direction, but any attention was probably better than no attention. “What the fuck is going on?”

Her head snapped to the side immediately and she leaned closer, eyes wide with disbelief. “Seawe - Danny!” She hadn’t seem him in months. She hadn’t even really thought about him in months. “What are you doing here?” 

It was one of those rare occasions when the stars seemed to align perfectly right and all four Maddocks were together under one roof. When Phoebe arrived to mother’s flat above the flower shop, she let herself in, half expecting the locks to have changed in her absence. Three weeks and four days to be exact, and long enough to warrant an owl from Alfie to bring the prodigal daughter home from another one of her mysterious business trips. 

By the time Phoebe walked through the door, Mama Maddock was already slaving away at the stove. From the smell alone, she could tell it was one of her brother’s favorites. He had made the World Cup team, after all, and it was only fair that dinner was presumably in his honor tonight. She sure as hell couldn’t argue with that logic. 

Shrugging off her leather jacket, the middle Maddock made herself right at home pivoting on her stiletto heel to face her family as if it hadn’t been ages. “Holá.”

@charlottemaddock​

“Stranger! There’s a stranger in our house!” she called out with a grin, her words contrasting with how relaxedly she remained draped across the sofa. Alfie’s exasperated and amused sigh only served to egg Charlotte on, and she raised the comic in her hands, pretending to cower behind it. “MAMA! PHOEBE’S HEREEEEEE!” 

Ravenclaw: I don’t believe that’s how it—

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Julian was trying not to shout; getting a broom would be easier without a passenger. But Merlin, she was going to tell him what to do? Julian didn’t even catch which charm she had used, looking up at his one hand. The broom he was holding was shaking beyond his control and he was going to drop both of them—

The broom steadied itself once Charlotte had finished casting Gemino but everything happened too quickly. He watched the second broom drop, then saw Charlotte catch it with the swiftness of a Quidditch player. Once she had let go, he felt relief for a brief split second.

Perhaps the broom didn’t want to cooperate; it seemed to realize that there was one less person hanging from below and jerked wildly as Julian tried to hold on. He wasn’t sure how long he had been holding the both of them nor was he sure the broom was actually moving very much, but all of it combined: hanging above the lake below with the castle falling apart around them, gripping the broom handle with as much might as he could, and worse of all the uncertainty of whether or not this was actually a dream–

His hand slipped from the broom he was holding, and he began to drop to the pool below.

It was only after glancing back that Charlotte realised it wasn’t Professor Wood who had been doing all the shaking, it had been the broom itself, and she watched in horror as he was being thrown around. “Professor are you-”

The broom slipped from his grasp and and skyrocketed upwards, shattering somewhere fare above them with with the familiar boom of fireworks exploding. Charlotte didn’t pay any attention to the fragments falling down around them, instead angling her broom handle almost directly downwards as she shot towards her falling Professor. He had been above her to start off with, so she managed to catch up with him in no time at all, but to her increasing alarm she found she couldn’t quite catch him.  Every attempt at contact resulted in him slipping from her grasp and she scowled, pulling out her wand again. 

“Arresto momentum!” 

Her first, second, and third attempts all missed - it was too difficult trying to cast on a moving object while also flying at breakneck speeds. A blur of movement beneath him caught her attention, though Charlotte didn’t spend too much time trying to think about what it was - at this point, unknown = bad was a safe assumption. Leaving the steering of the broom only to her legs and lower torso, Charlotte reached forward with her other arm in desperation. The fourth spell hit at the same time that her hand grazed his coat and she grabbed on tight, wrapping her arm around him and yanking him away from the tentacle that had broken through the surface. 

Julian was supposed to be the adult here, but it just now occurred to him how heavy of a responsibility this was. He didn’t remember falling asleep and he couldn’t be convinced that this was a dream. It had to be a dream—

He wasn’t aware there were other forces at play when he had done this experiment, variables he couldn’t control. What was a stupider idea? To take a partner with him or to do this experiment alone? There were so few people he trusted to figure out how all of his memories were inlaid into his head.

“Don’t you have a wand?” he shouted back. Come on—he was the one who taught her magic. And his own hands were full. The broom he clung on to hadn’t moved, at least until Julian swung the both of them precariously. He knew well enough how to control a broom while mounted on it, but hanging from it was a different matter.

His eyes closed—should he be able to do that in a dream? The broomstick rose higher, slowly pulling them away from the cavernous sinkhole. He didn’t have a sense of direction if only because Hogwarts didn’t have giant holes in its architecture leading into the lake—and in a dream there wasn’t any way out except:

“We have to go down—"

Her wand. Of course. In her desperation not to fall, Charlotte had been more focused on grabbing onto something - physical instinct - than thinking of a magical means to save herself. Luckily she had made it easy to grab and within a few seconds of fumbling and trying to stay calm even as she felt her grip continue to slip, her wand was in her hand. She took a few seconds to adjust with it, trying not to point it at herself and nearly dropping it when she felt her whole body swing. "Shit, don't do that!" Charlotte yelled up at her former Professor, kicking her legs a bit to try and balance her momentum. She wasn't sure how much longer she could hold on now, her hand having slipped down to precarious levels but even with her wand she wasn't sure exactly what to do. How could she get of this?

Her gaze went up to the broom again, and Charlotte made a snap decision as she felt it start to rise. She twisted herself so that she could aim up at it properly. "Gemino!" she yelled, hoping it would work, praying, because if it didn't she was going to fall -

The appearance of a second broom right beside the first one sent a wave of relief over Charlotte and she jammed her wand back into her robes, reaching out to grab the second broom as they drifted upward past it. Instinct honed from years of Quidditch practice kicked in and Charlotte wrapped her legs around the broom, pulling herself onto it and sitting upright within a few seconds. She let out a sigh of relief, sagging a little in the comforting feeling of once more being safe. She stretched out her other hand, as she angled herself to look back at Professor Wood skeptically. "Down? We want to go back in?"

“It makes your dreams more vivid.” Julian twisted the ring around his finger, not that it really did anything more. “But I think… the best way to really explain where we are is just a really vivid dream, right? Dreaming and remembering are sort of the same things, I think… but you only do one willingly.”

He was beginning to sound less and less confident the more they wandered around the ‘castle’ – he knew the place like the back of his hand, but his foot slipped. The floor beneath him crumbled; he and Charlotte started to fall to their –

He couldn’t call it death, and this moment of realization might have saved him when his arm reached out for something to grab in their free fall. Julian didn’t realize he had his own eyes shut until he finally opened them again. He looked down at his right hand, hanging on to Charlotte swinging to the opening below. His left hand was hanging on to a broomstick, which seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

Between the collapsing parts of the floors below, Julian spotted water – dark and looming as the lake he remembered was outside. “Charlotte – do not – do not let go of my arm!”

"Vivid…I see," Charlotte said slowly. That wasn't directly related to not needing sleep at all, right? "I guess they are kind of similar. But remembering isn't always willing." She knew the pain of irrepressible memories all too well. She continued to look around, trying to spot differences between this castle and the real Hogwarts. There were surprisingly little - even the portraits were the same. She had stopped to pull a face at the harpie cellist in one of the fourth floor corridors when everything suddenly shifted. The floor seemed to fall away from beneath her feet like a chessboard being flipped by a sore loser and she shrieked in surprise, reaching for the nearest solid object.

"What the-"

The object she had grabbed turned out to be Professor Wood's arm - which she quickly realised was the only thing preventing her from falling to a cold death in the abyss that seemed to have opened up in the castle. "Okay I definitely don't remember this part of the castle!" she yelled up at him, her heart still racing with fear. She tightened her grip and looked up at him - it beat looking down anyway - trying to see what was preventing him from following her and falling. "Of course it's a broom with you Woods," she muttered. "Do you always play a game of fly or die in your dreams?" Her eyes widened as she felt her fingers slip down his arm a few millimetres - even with her iron grip, her strength in one arm wasn't enough to support  her entire body. "And, uhh, I think we might want to figure a way out of this soon!"

“Just a bit carried away – is that it?” Roxanne quirked an amused brow, carrying the snacks to the desk, shaking her head with a smirk before stepping over to her intern, offering her a hand to help her up. She was happy to see her intern had regained some of her spirit. Obviously she hadn’t expected things to just get better over time after the younger girl had lost her brother, especially when the very people responsible remained at large, but it was nice to see she could still find it in her to take it easy every now and then. Maybe she could learn a thing or two from her intern about taking a breather… perhaps without the hat and monocle.

“It’s good to see you’ve got your thinking cap on – shit just keeps getting weirder and weirder. They’re getting bolder and bolder and we still aren’t any closer to catching them than we were before. We need to work a miracle here and I’ll welcome any help we can get – caffeine and hats included.”

"Yeah just - just a bit," Charlotte grinned as she accepted Roxanne's hand as she got to her feet. She placed the now thoroughly crumpled parchment on the table and peered into the café bag, ready to dig into the snacks. "Where did you get these?" she asked, pulling out a slice of chocolate cake delightedly. There was never a bad time for cake.

"Oh! About that," Charlotte began excitedly, putting the cake back down the picking up the parchment instead. "I'm not sure if it was the hat. But I had an idea. Remember when Murthy came in and dumped all those files in the corner of the room?" she nodded towards the stack of boxes she had been rummaging through earlier. "Well I was reading some of them when I was bored and waiting for evidence a while back, and when I pinned up the board I just suddenly remembered this." She handed it over to Roxanne eagerly, watching for her reaction. "What do you think, do you think it could be related?"

Julian would have sprinted into the weird glittering portion of wall, just to avoid the apprehension. Instead, he sort of did something in between that and walking calmly – it was like a hurried fastwalk, sort of the same speed he had when he needed to interfere in a fight between students.

“Yeah – your brain doesn’t need a wand to work, your brain is your brain – and – er…”

He wasn’t really sure if he was in control; it was like his magic wasn’t emanating from his hands in any sort of direction. Julian mostly felt like he was being pulled like a puppet on a string with how his back was straight as he wandered into his mirror dimension. “Theoretically, you should be able to. It would be like occlumency then – you’re blocking me –”

Julian made a motion to the glittery wall.

“—from getting into your head. That’s the defensive part… and we’ll get to that, eventually.”

The sound of his own voice distorted a little, which was the only indication that he had passed through that gate, so to speak; he should be in a dream space – its what’s his head would look like had it known how to organize itself into something tangible. Instead of someplace new or interesting or even different, it were as if Julian hadn’t left the castle at all! He couldn’t help but feel particularly disappointed, but hopefully it would be easy to navigate.

He was trying not to have too many teaching moments and he waved his right hand. “So this ring… supposedly helps with dreams – in theory, it should help us figure out my brain works.”

“So....the inside of your head just looks like Hogwarts?” Part of Charlotte had been excited to discover whatever juicy and scandalous secrets he kept, and she couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed that she didn’t immediately see anything out of the ordinary. She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “I thought Professors were supposed to have lives outside of school y’know, be actual people and all that.”

“A dream ring?” Charlotte’s eyes snapped to his hand, suddenly focused. She fidgeted a bit with the ring on her own finger, wondering if she should mention that she was wearing something that did the presumably opposite effect. That would probably be the smarter idea, since they were experimenting in uncharted territory, but Charlotte liked not needing sleep as being her little secret. “What - err, what kind of effect does that have?”