nathaniel preston pinnock

The dried oranges glistened in the mid-morning light when Catelyn picked them up to thread them on twine, filling her home with the warm, comforting scent of Christmas. She bunched herbs together to twist around the twine, and after an hour, she was left with a beautiful, cosy garland.

She stood, brushing her hands off on her sweats, then removed her wand. She hummed to herself as she raised it, her free hand sweeping through the air to raise the garland. Her wand shifted left to right to adjust its positioning, just as she felt the wards of her home being disrupted.

She cocked her head, considering the signatures for a moment. The twins. She smiled, extending the hand that wasn't holding her wand to flick towards the door so that it unlocked. "Come in!" She called, then returned to the garland, a dent in her forehead as she tried to apply a sticking charm while maintaining its positioning.

"Would one of you come in here and help me with this?" She asked, not having a chance to turn to face her niece and nephew. One of them did help, and then Cat let her hands drop, pocketing her wand as she headed into the living room.

Catelyn was taken aback. It wasn't abnormal for Nate to appear on her doorstep, dishevelled and generally unwell, but Harriet looked as though someone had put her through a tumble-dryer as well. She blinked, opening her mouth with a frown and then deciding to close it.

Nate went to say something, but she shook her head, raising a hand. "I need to know if you are safe. Do either of you need medical attention?" She looked between the two, and Harriet shook her head stiffly. "No? Okay. You both go clean up. There's towels under the sink. I'll get a pot of coffee going."

Before Nate could protest further- and he very much looked like he wanted to- Cat turned back to her kitchen to set about preparing the pot. She heared movement, and she leaned back to see a set of muddy (or... sooty?) footprints down her carpet. Catelyn scowled, pointing her wand down at the floor to vanish them away, before calling out, "And take those shoes off, Harriet Pinnock! Merlin knows your mother raised you better than that!"

They butted shoulders against each other and got stuck trying to walk through the door at the same time, and with a very unnecessarily loud and begrudging sigh, Nate conceded to Harriet showering first. She promptly shut the door in his face without saying a word, but instead gave him an extremely cryptic look that even with their freakish ability to communicate with near-telepathic levels of intuition, Nate couldn’t, in his drained and exhausted state, make any sense of.

He went instead into the room that Loxley and Dona had shared as kids and sat down on one of the beds. He’d only intended to sit and process what had just happened for a moment, but in the span of time that his foggy brain comprehended as a single blink, Harriet was already entering the bedroom wrapped in a bath towel and hissing, “What are you even doing?” And Nate realized he’d just been sitting here, staring into space for God-knows how long. 

Nate rubbed at his eyes and gave a groan. Fuck, he was so fucking tired. And likely he meant the question to be rhetorical, but Harriet had often served as the sounding board for Nate’s stupid and/or existential rhetorical queries over the years, so he looked at her and asked, “Did that all actually just fucking happen?”

A complex emotion crossed over Harriet’s face, before she repositioned it into her practiced blank stare again. “Do not start with that mopey shit, Nate—we’re better off without her,” Harriet insisted.

And just because Nate was legitimately too fucking tired to get defensive and argue that he wasn’t ‘moping’ over the woman who had basically ruined his entire life and literally just tried to blow him up—again—(definitely not because his chest was actually throbbing thinking about everything she’d said and everything she hadn’t said and the fucking finality of the way she’d told him ‘we’re done’—), Nate showed a rare moment of being able to hold his fucking tongue as he walked into Cat’s bathroom, and shut the door, and stood underneath the hot water until it ran cold. Which his aunt would scold him for, Nate was sure of it. Maybe he deserved it.

Maybe he deserved all of it.

Morning slipped into afternoon, and Nate and Harriet found themselves sitting at the small table in Catelyn’s kitchen, not talking, slurping at mugs of coffee and generally acting like zombies until finally Cat said, “Is one of you going to tell me what’s going on?”

The siblings exchanged a quick glance, and then rather than answering his aunt’s question directly, Nate instead asked, “Is Loxley planning to come home for the holidays?” He didn’t bother asking about Dona—he already knew the answer, and knew that nobody wanted to think or talk about that. “Or…is it gonna put you out, if we stay here?”