vincent sinclair

It was too early for this.

Usually Rita had some time to herself in the office every morning. Even if she had to head out to chase a story, she would usually make time to spend some blissful, uninterrupted minutes at her desk so she could organise her thoughts and smoke a cigarette before the day really began. This time was crucial, because as well as it allowing her to steel herself for all that was about to be thrown at her, it also gave her a period where she wouldn’t have to talk to (or listen to ) Vince.

So seeing him standing above her, far earlier than expected and already armed with a quip about her job, was nothing short of a buzzkill. All Rita’s warm feelings about the beautiful morning and the pile of tips on her desk that she was looking forward to digging into had promptly disappeared, replaced with the sneaking suspicion that her morning was not going to be as productive as she’d first hoped. Though she didn’t like him knowing that his disdain irked her, her eyes rolled almost involuntarily before she caught herself and shot back at him.

“Actually, someone told me I could find a washed up journalist who looked like they haven’t washed their hair in a while begging for a new job on Diagon Alley. Looks like they were right.” She smirked at her own comment and brought her coffee to her lips for a moment before adding, “Besides, I’m always around this early, you’re just usually asleep or chasing down pointless stories at this time. Tell me, how is that article on the sudden decline in owl breeding going?”

-

“Oh shit, really?” Vince chirped, the eye roll - the sheer energy leaving her at the sight of him, a victory only second to an Order mission gone right - emboldening him like no other thing could that early in the morning. Maybe a coffee with a few extra espresso shots, but still. He looked around, over-dramatically over both shoulders, eyes wide and eyebrows raised as he pretended to search for someone. “Where are they? Sounds like exactly my type, and desperate to boot.”

“It’s going well,” he said, and if he’d had the dignity to grit his teeth when he said it he would have - instead it just came through in his voice, dripping with disdain. Not even at Rita, because she didn’t assign him his beats, but the annoyance of her asking him was clearly there anyway. “You’d love it, actually. The breeders are all gossiping back and forth about why they think the owls aren’t biting anymore, one of them blamed a competitor for breeding theirs too aggressively. Think they’ve incested the poor creatures into impotency, which is hilarious. I’m sure you could work that in to whatever column you’ve got next about the Lestranges, yeah? Interesting parallels, there.”

“It’s nice seeing you outside of work, anyway,” Vince carried on, letting himself be as annoyingly chipper as possible; that was the relationship they had, and why not get it out early instead of firing back and forth from their neighboring desks. “Proves you’re a real human and not, y’know, stored in the cupboard at the Prophet created to write ridiculous stories. What’s on deck today?”

The best part of Vince’s night, at least on nights where he found himself lingering at headquarters, was when he finally got to take his final annoyed look at Alastor Moody and take his exit.

Tonight, post-debrief, was no exception. The mission had been simple enough; he and Alice had been sent to monitor a swanky high-rise flat building right on the edge of muggle and wizarding London; keeping an eye out for who went in and out, noting if multiple appearances were made, taking Silencioed photos, the usual. Nothing terribly exciting, though the sighting of a couple almost-familiar faces had, at least, kept them busy and sparked enough interest for a proper de-brief afterwards.

Now he’d been set free, the night was still fairly young, and he found himself leaving the dusty old Moody house side by side with Alice Fortescue. They’d been comrades for a while now, and Alice was just about one of the nicest people he knew - it wasn’t often they were paired up together, though, and Vince was feeling restless.

“Not a bad night,” he chirped, shaking out a cigarette from its pack before offering it to Alice - he wasn’t sure if she smoked, but he was a polite lad when he wanted to be. “But it’s early, innit? How about we go get a drink? There’s a little muggle pub down the street, I’ve got a hunch that it must be Alastor’s usual haunt... I bet we could get some stories out of them if we bring up the old man. I’ve never seen him drunk but I know he’s got that little side flask, he must treat himself to a pint now and then.”

date: 2nd august, 1978 time: 7am location: diagon alley OPEN

Rita did not consider herself to be an early bird or a night owl. She found labels of all kinds to be unnecessary and extremely limiting (heterosexual, gossip columnist, Muggleborn), and these were no exception. Not only that, but neither really applied to her, being one of those freakish souls who could survive on astonishingly little sleep; falling into her bed at 2am after a long night of writing and bouncing out of bed again at 5:30am so that she could be one of the first in the office.

That being said, there was something about mornings that she found incredibly energising - the possibilities, the blank slate. Living on Diagon Alley certainly helped, her curiosity always propelling her out of her flat to watch all the shops open, their wares for the day displayed outside or in the windows. Her pace would slow as she passed the market stalls, eyes scanning to see if there was anything worth buying or writing about (there never was) as she sipped a coffee bought along the way.

It was a warm morning already, and Rita happily sat on a bench in the sun, soaking it up as much as she could ahead of her long day in a room where sunlight was often obscured by cigarette smoke and many enormous male egos. Her eyes had closed in contentment for a moment, only for a shadow to fall across her face seconds later and cause her to open them again, expression confused until she registered who it was.

“Oh, it’s you. I wasn’t expecting to see you until later.”

-

As much as Vince hated admitting it - and at least he didn’t need to acknowledge it - he had far more in common with Rita Skeeter than either of them would ideally like. 

In this case, it was the rather unhealthy (but useful!) ability to sleep very little and still attack the day with some degree of energy. His was more manic, maybe, and the grumpiness of a too-early morning still permeated through his mood on those mornings he was out of his flat before the sun was up. But Vince didn’t really operate on schedules - that’s why working the job he did, well, worked. Sure, he was expected to be there for a chunk of the day, but he was more or less encouraged to be out and about scrounging up interviews and beats just as often.

His extracurricular activities had him out and up at all hours, too, but he could hardly factor those into his workday.

Long story short, the thought of ah, there she is hitting him far earlier than usual - coffee in one hand, eyes bleary despite the spring in his step - was enough to make Vince stop and blink down at Rita Skeeter on her little park bench. 

“That’s the joy of me, Skeets. I’m all over the place,” he said, fighting back a yawn but managing to get his most annoying faux-charming wink out in her direction before taking a sip of his coffee. “You’re out here early, did you hear some whispers about Celestina Warbeck snogging a dog in the park something?”

black ties & little lies | vince & tyler | suwha auction

-

It had been said before—by people who had nothing better to talk about, which was far too many of them—that Tyler Warrington Jr. was not the same person without his house that he was within. 

Of course, it was all conjecture. True conjecture, even so; rock solid fact sifted, by accident, out of the fantasy. 

But those that crossed his path outside the house rarely saw the many masks he took off (or perhaps put on, depending on whom one asked) when he crossed the threshold and relaxed into the privacy of his own space; his own wife, his own son, his own world. Nobody except Marya knew what her cold, foreign husband was like when he locked himself away in the warm, homeland hearth of the manor; other than Nathanial, who’d yet to know his father outside of these walls. 

All this to say: Tyler fucking hated entertaining. 

He liked parties just as much as he was required to; liked socializing for the power gains, despite never quite learning the unspoken language that slithered between the flowery English words that tasted like rank perfume on his tongue. The shorter the better, was his preferred method of socialization. One drink, two tops, and as many long silences as could be packed in before the ice cubes melted. 

Events at his own manor? They were the worst of all. A dinner party he could make chilly peace with, because Marya was always charming and there was a reliable cadence to those affairs – drinks, dinner, dessert, drinks, goodnights. But beyond the stressed and frantic lead-up that spun Marya into a tizzy before any important event, and the echoes that overstayed their welcome long past the guests who’d done the same? Beyond the reminders of other people’s fingers touching this things; other people’s overfamiliar energies crowding his halls? Even beyond the recent pregnancy news and his protectiveness; lingering remnants of his Master’s bidding tucked away inside the house; the fact that objects were changing hands under the table even as money passed over it? 

It was fucking awful—чертовски ужасно—to have to be the world’s version of the Warrington heir when he was here, unplanted on his own soil; choking on the dirt and feeling like his roots were cut. 

So, with a charming and polite smile, Tyler excused himself from the auction for some air. 

Air was the last thing on his mind; it was motion he needed, a brisk walk and a room free of an audience. There were myriad ways to regain his composure, all of them at his fingertips once he was freed. Going over the accounts and family financial statements; scribbling off a quick letter in caustic Russian cursive to his mamochka; simply pacing his study and ensuring that the safe was still locked and the real artifacts he’d swapped for the cheap fakes downstairs had not been touched, could still be delivered to the Dark Lord after nightfall. 

It was the ajar door, not any of those things, that caught Tyler’s attention first. 

Nobody else was supposed to be in the library but surely this young man—this stranger—knew that already. 

Anyone who smiled as quickly and as persistently as him either thought they were getting away with something or didn’t have much capacity to think at all. 

Clearing his throat, Tyler set down the drink in his hand on a nearby console table. He watched as condensation sweat ran down the glass and pooled onto the unprotected wood, unable to realize that his temper was rising until he first realized where his caution came from – not wanting to leave potential evidence of having been here, rather than something petty like a stained ring. Tyler positioned himself solidly in the doorway, impassable as his expression. 

“Try again.” 

And though he said it with a smile, the words were not kind. HIs implication was clear enough: I don’t believe you, but I like to play with my food before I eat it. 

Tyler had burned too much energy today mollifying the people he needed to in order to make his life easier. He would not set himself aflame to warm this strange intruder that didn’t mean a thing to him. 

“Unless you were hoping to piss in one of my books,” he added. It was a very reasonable type of anger, the type he held onto. In his opinion, anyway. There was no sadistic gleam in his eye, no jumping desperately at the chance to let something out. Just a man who knew what had to be done, if it had to be done; if lines were crossed. 

Politely, Tyler readjusted one cuff of his shirtsleeve. 

“This area of the house is off limits. The right direction—for you—is likely through the front door, down the walk, and back to wherever you arrived from.” 

-

Truth be told, Vince wasn’t terribly used to his charm - cranked up to eleven as it was, dressed as sharply and as put together as he was - not... working.

Sure, there were the odd times here or there were it just didn’t land with people, but Working Vince and Regular Vince were very nearly two different men. If he was in a casual setting and his charm didn’t work, well, that was some defect on the other person’s chemical makeup. This was Working Vince, though; personable and charming and thoughtful for a living, until he wasn’t, but that usually didn’t happen until a good twenty minutes or so into a rough interview.

This wasn’t even an interview; this was a man, a smiling but clearly quite tightly strung man, who did not like Vince off the goddamn bat.

Fuck, Vince thought to himself, eloquently, mostly at himself for getting caught so easily, blinking at the blonde man and keeping his best, most charming grin still on his face. He wasn’t an amateur, at least.

“You caught me, man. It’s an insatiable curiosity - I wander into the wrong room, I see a bunch of books, I can’t help it. Proper bloody rude of me,” he looked the man up and down as subtly as he could. Looking for a sign of lessening tension, no luck, or even something that might identity a better avenue of conversation. “You must be Tyler Warrington,” that was a no-brainer if the books he was potentially about to piss in were his. There was a trace of an accent, too, which he’d known would be there going in. Not that he knew he’d have to go head to head with the man of the fucking house.

Warrington’s next few statements, accompanied by the scariest-casual adjustment of a shirtsleeve, did at least do one thing positively: sharpened Vince’s awareness, slid him firmly toward taking this seriously when he was still hovering in that balance of, well, maybe a joke or two could help.

“We really have gotten off on the wrong foot, haven’t we?” A bold step forward, a bolder hand held out for a shake. “I’m Vince Sinclair, from the Daily Prophet. I really mean no harm, mate, I’m just here to do a little write up of the auction. I was invited, got the note and everything.” He blinked again, mentally noting the exit options - Moody’d be proud, maybe, if Warrington wasn’t blocking the only obvious exit and the only other one was a lovely little window at the back of the room facing, he assumed, the bloody street.

“It’s a lovely home,” he offered up, wondering how far flattery would take him with such a... serious looking man. 

-

Following her altercation with Adelaide, Safiye had stepped out of the barn to get some much needed, head-clearing, fresh air. Whether from the air or from the fight, Safiye was feeling much more sober, and she reentered the barn determined to redeem her evening. Her road to redemption, apparently, led to a conversation she’d been meaning to have with Vincent Sinclair. 

She frowned deeply at Vince’s response to what had been, in her mind, a frank and businesslike overture. The familiarity of coming up with a nickname for her, and not even a creative one, rankled, but what was truly concerning was how confused he seemed. Perhaps Vincent was too drunk for such a conversation. It didn’t help that he’d clearly overheard her interaction with Adelaide and had decided to feel smug and superior about it. “We are not a team and war is not a sport. My personal feelings for Adelaide have no impact on my ability to fight alongside her when necessary.” 

This conversation wasn’t at all going the way she’d expected it to. She’d imagined that Vincent would be open to constructive criticism, willing to do what was needed in order to make the work he did for the order more effective. Apparently she’d been wrong. She flipped a handful of hair over her shoulder impatiently and rolled her eyes, realizing she would have to spell things out for the man. 

“The simple fact that your journalist’s press pass wasn’t enough to prevent you being evicted from the auction is proof that it is not the magical, all-access card you seem to think it to be. But if you’re going to allow your ego to prevent you from doing the necessary work, then you need to stop accepting assignments you insist on being unqualified for.” She swiped a thumb under her lower lip, fixing lipstick that she knew didn’t need it. She owed him no explanation or justification, but she couldn’t let the gall of assuming he knew her to go unanswered. “You don’t know who I am, do not make the mistake of thinking that you do.”

-

“Well, no, love, we are a team - we’re on the same side of the war, right? I don’t think that’s something I’m completely making up, here,” Vince said, fixing Safiye with a clear-eyed stare that, to someone who knew him better, would be a warning sign that they were walking down a path they surely did not mean to walk down. “And the fact that you’re scoffing at the idea of being on the same team as people like Adelaide, or me, apparently, is probably part of the reason why you seem so eager to get into arguments with us.”

Vince blinked up at her, taking an insolently long sip of his drink for the duration of her rant at him, confusion furrowing his brow and, despite his best effort, making him snort - unseemly - into his drink by the end of the diatribe. When he spoke it was light and breezy, with an obvious edge but not verging into outright anger; he didn’t need to get mean with the woman just yet, with clearly enough to drink in her to wander around picking fights with the people she was supposed to be training with. They’d all been there before in some capacity, and even Vince was willing to give a bit of benefit of the doubt.

“I clearly don’t think the press pass is an all-access card - even though, you know, it should be. You’re mad at a pureblood nutjob not liking the look of me in his big fancy house, catching me doing my job for the Order with as much stealth as I could possibly muster while still being a visible participant in the evening, and deciding that the fact that I was a clearly not pureblood working for the Prophet was enough to throw me out. You’re acting as if he caught me and I blabbered out,” his voice pitched up in a comically exaggerated impression of himself under duress, “ ‘sorry, mate, I’m actually working for the vigilantes trying to take your friends and family and maybe you down - oops!’ But hey, I’m not taking notes from you, Safiye, because I’m not a pureblood who can walk into shit like that and not get stares from every single stuck up prick there like you are. My mission was a fuck up, but I don’t recall asking you for your opinions on it. That’s not your place, and I sure as hell would never walk up to you in the middle of goddamn nowhere to bring up a recent failure of yours. How about that?”

He didn’t need to comment on her remark about his ego: everyone in the room knew it was too huge for his own good, and he wouldn’t bite at such obvious bait when it was futile to argue otherwise.

“And you don’t know a single thing about me, clearly, to walk over here and tell me how to do my literal job,” he finished brightly, still refusing to let anger completely overtake his genuine amusement at Safiye’s determination to, apparently, make people severely dislike her. “So, again, I ask: would you like another drink and would you like to unclench long enough to enjoy the night? The whole point of getting to know each other, you know? Unless you want to keep taking out whatever frustration you’re harboring I suggest you find someone else, I’m not super in the mood. I like to have fun during parties, you see.”

wayward souls | vince & sirius | the barns

- 

“Flatterer,” said Sirius genially – pleasant-as-punch, as though it was the only thing he’d ever called the man. There was a saying Sirius liked to ignore, something about never meeting one’s heroes. But Vince was just the opposite; he became more of a hero in Sirius’s eyes the more times their paths crossed. More than that? He was starting to feel like a friend, and there was nobody Sirius Black hero-worshipped more than his friends. But he kept it casual today, humming two short notes and musing over his potion, stirring it counterclockwise and shooting it a wink—insentience be damned—when it obliged him in turning a pea green. 

On instinct, he craned his neck to search the other side of the room, worry about Remus a binary star tied to any potions successes. 

“I would be bored,” Sirius pointed out, teasing the knob of his burner to the left, decreasing the flame as his attention waned, too. “If I wasn’t so busy being fucking grateful that I’m not running a lap right now. My lungs aren’t made for this, mate,” he said, as though he wasn’t the one that’d beaten them into submission with packs of cigarettes over the years. “Neither are my legs.” 

The blame for that one fell squarely on his parents, which is precisely where Sirius preferred his blame to fall. He muttered something under his breath that sounded like, inbreeding bastards. 

“You’d better hope Moody doesn’t have us switch to brewing revival potions then,” Sirius said, snorted in a laugh under his breath – just for Vince, safe from Alastor’s prying ears and the chance he might give the old man any unpleasant and productive ideas. 

“Ideologically, I’m opposed to this whole thing,” he said, gesturing back to the potion. “The whole…following directions to the letter bit. Makes me feel dirty, and not in the fun way.” 

He used his stirring stick as emphasis, pointing out a free edge of the table as he leaned up against another, inviting Vince to sidle up for a chat and join him in pissing away the time until the more exciting drills came around again. It occurred to Sirius too late that it might be against the rules; then again, if the Order wasn’t encouraging any civil disobedience in its members, it was kind of a shit vigilante group, was it not? 

“Plus this absolute prick I grew up with comes from a family in the potions space, and that doesn’t bloody help,” he added, lip curling around the afterthought. The last thing this Barns oasis needed was even the passing mental interference of one Antonin Dolohov. 

“So,” he prodded, arching a brow and leaning in as he hopped off his metaphorical interview soapbox. Sirius was eager to learn after all, eager to soak everything up and push Vince soundly, step-by-step up onto the pedestal he’d unconsciously already built for him. It would do no good just babbling about himself; especially not when he was in the process of becoming a new self entirely. New flat, new job, new commitment to pissing on the fires burning down their world…’holding’ wasn’t the flashiest new skill for his tongue to pick up, but it seemed practical. 

“Fawley’s the one to watch out for, then?” Sirius lowered his voice, conspiratorial but also cautious, just in case it turned out to be true. “Really? Or do you have some sort of trick knee or pinning kink she’s going to exploit? That bird is tiny. Anyone else to keep an eye on?” 

-

“The laps are brutal,” Vince commiserated, shuddering at the thought. As an official veteran he wasn’t held to as high of standards as the newbies - at least, no one kept as close an eye on him - and, sure, he’d gotten a lot better at running, but he had always been built for short sprints. Running away from angry adults as a young kid breaking bottles with Danny-made slingshots, needing to jump over fences in short order both as a teen and now, an adult on less-than-legal missions, Prophet or Order related. He wasn’t made for running marathons; neither was Sirius Black, though Vince reckoned it could be trained into him.

You didn’t get to look like some Greek Adonis without at least having the potential for Olympic greatness, surely.

“Your poor legs,” Vince cooed, taking it as a welcome opportunity to size up the legs in question. Skinny, sure, but did it matter when Black had such a lovely arse on top? He didn’t think so, but his brain wasn’t always wired for thinking about logistics. “You’ll build some muscle up on ‘em by end of next week, guaranteed.” He heard the words under Sirius’s breath, and let out a loud laugh followed by a faux-outraged: “What did you just call me!”

“I hope for Moody to not do a lot of things, my young ward,” Vince sighed dramatically, immediately taking the proffered free space on the table - hoisting himself up, fairly gracefully, and letting his legs swing over the side as he peered into Sirius’s cauldron. It looked good, but what the fuck did he know? “It really is helpful, though. Not to sound all, fuckin’, mature or whatever, but all of us knowing at least how to do a bit of this shit ends up being a blessing. There’s only so many potions we can get swiped for us from Mungo’s.”

“A prick in the Potions space? Do tell,” Vince said breathlessly, his ear-for-gossip turning metaphorically bright red. Not that Vince was guaranteed to be on top of anything from Sirius’s year at school, he fancied himself a decent enough expert on the ridiculous shit that went down in the Pureblood world.

Vince glanced around the open field where the rest of Sirius’s cohorts were scattered around, some of them getting similar chats from the likes of Vince’s cohorts - probably more helpful, but Sirius didn’t really need any help - in various states of disarray or competence. It was a beautiful day and Vince was already looking forward to the first beer he could crack open as the sun went down: priorities.

“Fawley, yeah. She’s quick, man. All the ladies here will beat your arse and do it without breaking a sweat, for the most part. Gretchen’s the best duelist I’ve ever seen, Fawley has a mean swing. Alice can block anything you send at her and she does it all with a smile on her face, I cannot comprehend how. I’m usually red-faced and sweating by a few minutes in.” He grinned at Sirius, eyebrows waggling suggestively. “I’ve got many kinks these prudes will never figure out, but none of them have anything to do with getting thrown to the ground. That’s just talent, mate. I’m not so bad at the hand-to-hand myself, though, if I’m being honest.”

He’d been in too many fistfights - and not the kind with rules - to not be.

“What’re you most looking forward to, while you’re still allowed to think of it as fun exercises at the Barns instead of, like, oh fuck we need to do this to stay alive right this second? What’s your thing, Black, and I’m going to be pissed if you say it’s actually just potions.”

a little bit tired, a little bit wired || vince & benjy

“Is it normal to feel like I’m dead?” Benjy asked. He’d always been a bit too honest when people asked how he was, only finding the will to deliver the expected “good!” half the time. With VInce, he was only ever too honest, and with how training was going, he didn’t have a shot at telling even a total stranger a lie.

Maybe that was why they were all kept here. Bonding and unity were all well and good, but if he had to head back to his very new apartment every night, Mary eventually would have broken him. It was easier to think of it that way than acknowledge how little it would have taken.

“I mean, you’ve done this before, right? Is it a first time thing? Does it feel like this every year? And you should absolutely lie to me if it does, I need some light at the end of this. You can quote me on that.” He groaned slightly, late nights and early mornings only piling onto the physical toll of training. He felt like he couldn’t skip any of it, though. He needed to be on at every training; he needed to impress in every free moment. He thought graduation might come with a bit of reprieve from how hard he worked behind closed doors, but he was bearing just as much, if not more, with the exact same smile.

“Then, I only got to like point-one percent of my questions in the briefing today, but I know I’ll find someone to bother about that.” The smile wasn’t even mostly stress-worn, was the thing. It was genuine, driven by his curiosity and his passion. He wanted to know more; he brought a couple of books to unwind, but even in the rare few minutes he opened one, he found himself turning over his questions and everything that was happening around him. Every moment was spent working something out.

“Which covers pretty thoroughly how I am. Tired and happy and falling deeper in every minute. Thanks for asking,” Benjy finished with a chuckle and honestly unsure if he had, in fact. “What about you?”

@vince-whoisleft​

-

Vince sat comfortably - or, well, it looked comfortable, but the very DIY-esque wooden bench didn’t really make for proper comfortable - as he listened to Benjy go, half-empty beer in his hand (not his first choice of drink but certainly the easiest) and the gentle makings of a decent buzz surely on the near horizon.

The sun was setting, most of their comrades were either still finishing a later dinner or already making their way to the campfire or to the barn, depending on how their day had gone. Vince was happy to listen to the crickets chirping and his younger friend venting; it was an important part of bootcamp, after all.

“Completely normal. I had to be dragged out of bed the first few mornings, it was miserable.” Vince chirped, knowing it wasn’t helpful but leaning right in to his seniority as a not-new-member in order to get some teasing in. Benjy was tired but chatty, clearly not in any place where he was about to completely burn out; Vince would make sure of that. “It really doesn’t feel like this every year, man. Next year you’ll be training the newbies, might even get to sleep in a proper bed. And, y’know, you’ll have the whole year between this and next that isn’t going to really - slow down. Won’t be as concentrated constantly, sure, but shit’s just going to keep moving from here on out, Benjy boy.”

“You can ask me as much as you like, I can’t promise I’ll have any answers, though. Or answers you want to hear. Moody’d be your best bet if you can track him down in a quiet moment, but then you have to sit with Moody, so. Weigh your options. mate.” He took another swig of his shitty beer, winking at Benjy over the bottle. “Happy is the important bit. Hold on to that for dear life, it’ll make the next week feel a lot nicer.”

“I’m great, of course, always am.” Vince sing-songed, setting down his drink for just enough moments to rearrange the hair he had pulled up into a higher, tighter bun. The summer heat was sticking to his neck and he never got used to dealing with that feeling. “Using up two weeks of vacation time to sweat and get my arse handed to me in practice duels isn’t typically what I’d think of as worth it but you know what? I kind of love it out here. I’d probably die if I had to stay longer than the two weeks at a time, obviously, but this is the sweet spot. Do you want a beer?”

river of dreams ; gideon & vince

Gideon did not know how late it was; only that it was late, and that he was stuck staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. 

The closest thing to a pocketwatch available to him – at least in this light – was the fading, blunted stomp of Alastor Moody’s bad leg as it echoed through the otherwise-silent farmhouse.  Bed checks typically happened at three on the nose; whether Moody didn’t care about catching folks by surprise, wanted to give them some wiggle room to plan their mischief, or was just sufficiently convinced that he was scary enough to respect without bursting unannounced through the door, Gideon did not know. 

What he did know was that bed check tonight had passed either hours or minutes or seconds ago, which meant it was the deep middle of the night. All Moody would have found was a body in each bed; Vince asleep in one, and Gideon pretending to be asleep in his own. But as soon as the door closed and the footsteps faded away, it was back to staring at the bleak ceiling and the shadows that stained it. 

“Vince?” Gideon whispered it, quiet but so suddenly that it sounded louder than it ought to, hissing through the air like a teapot about to declare itself ready. It might have been a plausible thing, an ‘oh, were you awake?’ or ‘odd, I thought you were missing!’. But all of those required a mental commitment to untruths that Gideon didn’t have even on his better days, when the sun was up and he’d gotten some real sleep. 

So he spoke again - “Vince?” - in a mid-afternoon voice, sitting up while he said it, the sheets rustling away from him in protest. Assuming it best to go all in now that he was on the path, Gideon tossed his pillow through the air, across the empty space between the beds, and waited for the telltale thump of gravity dropping it upon Vince’s once-peacefully-breathing head. 

“What are the chances that you happen to be awake right now?” — @vince-whoisleft​

-

“High, man, very high,” Vince replied, groggy and throaty with the weight of deep sleep suddenly being pulled off him like a blanket.

Or, you know, like a pillow hitting him square on the face. Or the sound of Gideon’s voice through the fog of slumber, which had surely stirred him enough before the attack.

“Was I - was I snoring, or something, what the - what time is it - “ he spluttered, shaking his head in a vain attempt to rid himself of the sleepy cobwebs now firmly settled there. He blinked into the dark - too dark, he missed the constant-light through the window of his city flat - and pushed himself up onto his elbows, feeling decidedly... unsharp. He ran a hand through his hair before sitting up a little more straight, squinting through the gloom to where he knew Gideon was lying. Or sitting. Or plotting another bombardment, who knew.

“Are you okay?” Was the next thing out of Vince’s mouth, surprisingly coherent even as he continued clawing himself back to consciousness. It was well past a normal hour to be awake; he knew this only because he’d stayed up quite late down in the barn drinking with Gretchen, and he felt like he’d been asleep for longer than an hour. 

After their conversation - the one Vince had forced out of Gideon, sure, but a conversation nonetheless - it wasn’t a horrible leap to make, concern clear in the otherwise scratchy voice of his. 

“Bad dreams?”

on the mend // dorcas & vince

Dorcas felt both strange and strangely at home as she knelt on the hay-and-concrete carpeting of the stable, bent over a bubbling cauldron, chopping at acrid vegetables with one hand while she stirred the strengthening solution with the other. There was a beautiful, competent choreography to it that Dorcas didn’t often possess. Potions had little room for subjectivity, so Doe’s objective sharpness shone better there than in other places – even if she did favor Charms. 

It was the learning to become your own healer bit that was throwing her; so used to tending to Davey, to his unpredictable appreciation or chagrin. Her nose had been long stuck in books about how to help others – growing hearts or harnessing wolfsbane or puzzling over maledictus curses during last summer’s internship. The thought of helping herself seemed strange—silly, even—under the cloud of her joining the Order in the first place, her morals muddled by her desire to help others. 

If danger was coming, Dorcas wanted to be ready for it, to be sure…but she’d never been the ‘secure your mask before helping others’ type, and it was pulling her focus. 

“I have a theory,” she said, catching Vince’s eye as he passed by, craning his neck and clearly heading her way anyway. Dorcas was nestled in a private corner of the stables, craving some distance from the others so that she could work and, more importantly, work without the creeping-in of doubt that some others in the ranks inspired. “That I’m going to end up brewing so much of this stuff at headquarters that Moody can turn a tidy profit on the leftovers after the war ends.” 

@vince-whoisleft​

-

Vince was already half-planning to stop at Dorcas’s little solitary stable, but her inviting non-sequitur of a conversation starter stopped him full in his tracks and put a fond grin on his face to boot. Comfortable, somehow, in such a foreign location to him - Vince was a born-and-raised city boy, Hogwarts had been the most countryside he’d ever seen upon arrival - he leaned against the wall of the stable, straight out of the cover of some fluffy smutty cowboy-themed romance novel, as he looked down at the younger Ravenclaw alum thoughtfully.

“I love your theories,” he responded immediately, absolutely no trace of sarcasm or even the faraway dregs of a joke in his tone. He really did love Dorcas Meadowes’s theories, as out-of-reach they sometimes tended to be for his more straight forward brain. He watched her work, the precision in her movements impressive - as always with Dorcas - and laughed out loud once the theory was finally presented. “Christ, you’re probably right. It’s not like we’re going to go through gallons of strengthening solution. I don’t even know how well it works, to be honest, but maybe the placebo effect is enough to get your blood pumping.”

The thought of Moody going feral on the black market once the war was over, shilling amateurly brewed potions under some Alastor Moody Auror Super Potion label was too fucking good not to cherish.

“You’ll have plenty of other shit to do at headquarters, though, don’t worry,” he assured her, rolling his shoulders back a few times until he found a satisfactory little muscle pop. “I mean, unless you want to be Moody’s potions horse and help fund his ill-gotten post-war fortune, but I have a feeling you have bigger things in mind, yeah?”