#fcnwick

It had been time for Emm to take another wander around the stadium to check nothing was amiss but seeing Benjy was a welcome break from being on high alert. “How good is the zoom on that thing?” she asked, nodding at his camera. “And before you ask, no I’m not sure if I want to know to make it easier to watch the game or for other reasons.” Now she thought about it, though, she wondered if they shouldn’t have all just brought cameras with them and tried to get as many photos of the crowd as possible. There weren’t enough of them to really manage it, she knew, and there was every chance nothing would even happen at the event so it would be a waste of time but it was an idea for the future.

WHAT: quality bonding time!!

WHEN: march 28th ish?

WHERE: the easter thing??

Marlene was... easily distracted, so she lost James and Lily and Harry in the crowd. Hopefully Harry was still with them. Of course he was still with them. Pft. Pfft. Okay, so maybe she was the last person told to ‘keep an eye on him’ but she was pretty sure she remembered Lily picking him up before she wandered off. He was probably, definitely, maybe fine. It’s not like anyone ever really trusted Marlene with a child for more than like five seconds anyway. She was about to head back and look for her friends when she spotted another familiar face coming straight towards her. Her favourite familiar face. “Hey handsome, come here often?” she asked, physically unable to keep a straight face before a wolfish grin spread over her lips. “Seriously. I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever,” she continued, like they didn’t live together... like she hadn’t just seen him earlier that morning. So maybe she was a little codependent when it came to her roommate. Who cared? “Where have you been all my life, BenFen?”

When it came to friendships, Dirk preferred to keep a smaller group. He would never be the sort of person who was always in the middle of a crowd or having an active social life that involved somebody different every day. Barty had been part of that small group of people Dirk considered a close friend for a long time now, first meeting when they became dormmates at Hogwarts. Over the years he had seen Barty go through a few relationships but it wasn’t often something they talked about. It had never been a topic that interested Dirk all that much and Barty knew that.

Of course, things were a bit different now that there was the ongoing question of his feelings for Bertram. Like his eyes being opened in one sense had led to the number of couples around him no longer feeling quite as exhausting as it once had and when Barty brought up Benjy (albeit with the warning that he wasn’t really telling people), Dirk decided he might as well try and get to know Benjy a little better. They had a more in common, after all, besides Barty. They had met in Ravenclaw and were both muggleborn even if Benjy didn’t know about Dirk.

Dirk remembered Benjy mentioning he was a photographer now and so he came up with an idea that had been nudging at his mind anyway and contacted the man to get a little photography advice. “Thanks for meeting me,” he said, a cheap camera in one hand. “My mum’s always complaining that she doesn’t get to see anything of my life any more so I wanted to do a bit of a photo album for Christmas but it doesn’t feel like it’s going very well so far.”

After the complete and utter failure of the Halloween masquerade and the way it had culminated in her getting cornered in the bathroom by Bellatrix Lestrange (because she was apparently an idiot who after twelve years still hadn’t learned not to go to the bathroom alone) and then watching Isaac get arrested, Mary was almost surprised to find that she still liked the fact that she had seen so many of her friends in one go. It had been a terrible trigger for her anxiety but she still wanted to try. She still wanted to feel like she had her friends back again rather than settling into another rut of being so scared of leaving her comfort zone that she found herself engulfed in loneliness as everybody else carried on with their lives and she, unwilling to accept invitations to public outings or not feeling up to being social after a day at work, got left behind. She didn’t make enough of an effort most of the time and she knew it all too well. Her sister had told her plenty enough.

The first in her goal to make more of an effort had been visiting Marlene at work and the second was reaching out to the other old school friend she hadn’t seen at the masquerade. Benjy hadn’t been the only person she befriended out of muggleborn solidarity — after all, Lily was in her own dormitory — but in some ways it was nicer to have someone with a little more distance from her. Who hadn’t seen her cry because she didn’t want to go to Charms and who hadn’t had to deal with her tired and grumpy in the mornings after only getting half an hour’s sleep. It was impossible to find anybody their year or the years either side who didn’t know what had happened to her (or at least, the parts that had got out) and Benjy did get something of a front row seat to the quagmire of her and Bertram’s relationship with her leaving Ravenclaw tower fretfully after another argument about her friendship with James and Sirius. Those, however, were the events which made up Mary and meant he could understand her without pitying her as he probably would if he knew more details. He was a muggleborn and he wasn’t too scared to go to Quidditch matches or Hogsmeade weekends by sixth year.

But that was behind her. It was almost 1983 now and Mary had decided that 1983 was going to be different. She would forget about Mulciber and the Averys and anybody related to Sirius who wasn’t Sirius himself. She would start to do something to find justice for Harry and for Rosalind and so that other eleven year old muggleborns didn’t have to worry about being hexed in the corridors of their school. It was a scary thought but maybe facing some of her fears was what she finally needed to start to do. So, she had suggested they meet up for a bit of a catch up somewhere beautifully Muggle where she could pretend the war didn’t exist.