distant axis [harlan]

18 november

Honey hurried across the street; she’d finished lunch with just enough time to get back to the shop and flip the sign to ‘open’. There was an envelope on the doorstep and she scooped it up before she hurried inside--it had started snowing when she was eating and she hadn’t dressed for it--not bothering to look at it before she tossed it in the pile of new owl orders to process. She was elbow deep in candy floss when Caoimhe brought the (now open) envelope to her an hour later, letting her know it was, ‘er, personal’.

She got a good look at the envelope then, her name and address written in familiar handwriting, but not one she had been expecting. It took everything she had to finish what she was working on, so curious to know what Harlan would put in a letter rather than saying it to her face (though she’d come up with so many possibilities in the twenty minutes it took her to get around to opening it).

Envelope tucked into the pocket of her apron, Honey ducked into the pantry, well aware that she probably ought to wait until later because whatever he had to say to her promised to be distracting. But she couldn’t wait; she folded open the envelope and pulled a few things out, the most noticeable being a pair of tickets. Quidditch tickets, Portree tickets. She knew he was playing Portree this coming Saturday, was planning to go because she wasn’t about to let him dictate which matches she could and couldn’t go to--though up until now, he was doing it without his knowledge considering Honey had elected one time to not go to the semifinals between the two teams.

But he knew she had tickets already. It was at Portree.

Honey looked closer at the tickets; they were the same box seats he’d given her the last time around. She didn’t know what to think, didn’t want to assume it was an olive branch just to turn round and be proved wrong. She frowned, lost in thought for a few seconds before she remembered the other piece of parchment she was holding. She stuffed the tickets into her pocket and unfolded the parchment, nearly snorting at what she was reading. It was decidedly not an olive branch.

She stuck the note in her pocket, too, and tossed the envelope in the bin as she moved back to the kitchen, silently fuming. She had several more hours until she closed the shop, letting her anger bubble up under the surface as she went about the day, letting Caiomhe handle all the customer interactions while she stuck to the back.

She probably should have let herself calm down a little after the shop was closed, before she apparated to London. At the very least, she should have taken her flowery apron off, but she didn’t do either. She appeared around the corner from his building; the alley was usually dark but it felt darker now, hours after the sun had set. She might have been thinking about this for hours but she hadn’t figured out what she was going to say (let alone if she should say anything), supposed she could figure it out in the lift.

But there he was, walking toward her as she walked confidently past the doorman into the lobby. “Oi--” she wanted his attention, as if there was a possibility he hadn’t seen her. She pulled the parchment and one of the tickets--it was what she could get her hand on without much fumbling because now wasn’t the time for that--from her pocket. “What the fuck is your problem?”

@Harlan Bellamy

“You’ve been fed.”
 
Harlan hazarded a glance down at the cat who held his stare with an air of superiority, clearly expecting the man to do something. Aslan had always had that way about him, even when he belonged to Arya. He was commanding for such a small animal, though, he usually only asserted his dominance in Harlan’s direction. With anyone else, the bloody thing was a saint. “Merlin’s sake…”

Rolling his eyes, the wizard pulled out his wand from the pocket of his slacks and filled up the bowl so that it was right to the brim, just so. He hated that he so easily gave in but he had every intention of enjoying his evening with a clear conscience. not that he would admit that something so trivial would have been on his mind. Harlan pulled his coat over his broad shoulders as the sound of his door clicking to lock behind him was met with the ding of the lift.

Oi. He’d only made it all of five steps out of the ground floor when he was met with a familiar voice. Harlan’s grin faltered when he saw the look in Honey’s eye. It took him half a second to wrack his brain as to what he could have done that time, considering he hadn’t seen her since—

The tickets. Those fucking tickets. He sent them after an event fuelled by too much to drink, riding high of a good training session with a few newly hired guns on the team. It had been a bold move, but not entirely out of character. “What, no thank you?” Harlan titled his head slightly as they met in the middle ground, just near the concierge. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sydney, the doorman eyeing the situation hesitantly. The man knew Honey, of course, but he could see that this meeting was different to all the other times she’d slipped in unannounced.

That smile fell off his face as soon as he saw her. He looked surprised to see her; that was rich. Honey waved her hand through the air between them, the ticket and parchment she was clutching fluttering along, reminding him of what more or less amounted to an invitation to come see him.

She stopped in front of him and lowered her hand to her side, still balled into a fist. “Aye, cheers.” She rolled her eyes, just barely kept herself from laughing. “Thank you so much.” He wouldn’t have been able to mistake her tone for anything since. He couldn’t seriously have expected thanks from her, not after— he’s shown up to her shop and they’d talked about them and it had almost felt like progress, that they’d be able to figure things out if they had one more conversation sober. Then Honey had seen that photo, the one in the paper from his quidditch gala, with her. The wrong her.

Honey wasn’t bitter. (She was.) She was over it. (She wasn’t.)

There were two options here: 1) Harlan had stopped seeing her and was doing this as some sort of rebound or 2) he hadn’t stopped seeing her, hadn’t changed one bit. Neither suited her. “It’s not—“ fair, she wanted to say, but she wasn’t that desperate. “You didn’t answer my question.” Her tone was more even, more deliberate. “What’s your problem?” She didn’t care that they were still standing there in the middle of everything, or that they might be overheard, or that Harlan might end up being late to wherever he was headed.

For half of a second, Harlan pulled back, thinking that Honey might actually physically have a go at him. His deep grey eyes moved from that look on her face to her hand that was balled into a fist over the crumpled mess of tickets, his letter. The letter had been brief, of course, and a bit (more than that) tongue in cheek, yet still he hadn’t expected such the reaction. And he certainly didn’t expect to see Honey before the match where she would undoubtedly be wearing her brightest Portree garb and screaming the loudest anytime he came close to being injured.

Then again, some sinister part of him might have, wanted to, if he thought about it for too long.

“You’re welcome,” Harlan tried not to smile but there was a glimmer of it that met his eye unknowingly. He knew that it wasn’t the kind of friendly conversation that warranted such banter but he was still trying to work out what it all meant. Honey started to explain, then stopped. It was a familiar pattern. Instead, she came back to her original question– just what was his problem? Harlan could think of a few things off the top of his head, but sending her tickets to a match (for her team) didn’t feel like a significant one of them.

Harlan glanced over at Sydney who was politely watching the situation unfold from the corner of his eye. The doorman had become a friend over the years and he was always looking out for any prying eyes or anything that might serve as damage to the man's career. Harlan was far from the only one he was looking out for, either. "Look," He lowered his voice to align with the more serious look on his face. "I thought you might like tickets," He explained somewhat exasperatedly.  "Genuinely." He felt the need to bookend it.

You’re welcome. Merlin, she wished she had met him upstairs, where there’d be less witnessnes to her hexing that look off his face.

Harlan wasn’t quick to answer and it was as infuriating as ever. He couldn’t even keep his eyes on her. Look, he said, as if she hadn’t been looking at him the whole time. He lowered his voice and Honey nearly took a step forward to hear him better, even though she could hear him perfectly well. It was instinct, always wanting to be closer. A stupid instinct, and one she had to consciously fight.

She didn’t roll her eyes, thought she ought to be commended for it. “Genuinely,” she repeated, not believing him. “You don’t get to keep--” she paused, unsure where she’d been headed with that thought. She continued after another second: “Can’t keep inserting yourself into my life.” He wasn’t solely to blame for all their interactions since they broke up, but the most recent one--Harlan showing up to her flat, kissing her, and leaving--was absolutely his fault. But no matter whose fault it was, it set her back in the whole getting over Harlan thing she was trying to achieve. Distractions only worked so well.

Honey swallowed, shoved the ticket and letter back into the pocket of her apron. “Stop thinking about me--” she hesitated, so close to leaving it there, let that be her final request. But their last conversation, the one about how she was never all there for him, was nagging her into finishing her thought: “So I can stop thinking about you.”

The repetition from Honey was markedly less harsh than he knew he was owed, less than it would have been from him if the shoe were on the other foot. Harlan could nearly feel the sentiment behind her words before she finished the thought out loud. He couldn't keep inserting himself into her life. The irony wasn't lost that it was the very reason he felt so far from her when they were together. In hindsight, it went both ways.

Neither of them had quite figured out how to make room in their lives, fully.

Harlan ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek in thought. There was a knowing kind of pain that came with the admission, made worse by the fact that he very well knew that he wasn't being fair. Even something as innocent as tickets to a match (so that he could see him beat her team, of course), was just another way to keep her close enough. They'd been functioning that way for so long he wasn't sure what not doing it looked like.

"You're right," He figured the first step was to own up to his mistakes, another thing that he hadn't been great at when they were a they. "I'm—" Sorry, he was going to say, but then he heard the soft cough from Sydney who nodded to the woman who was pushing her way through the revolving door. Harlan cleared his throat and stood up more straight, glancing to his watch.

Unsurprisingly, he was early for the drink he was getting with a few of the Griffins' management. "Does going for a walk count?" As thinking about her. Harlan nearly grinned but stopped himself. It certifiably did but he wasn't sure he was ready for their conversation to end.

It was silent, save for the sound of Honey’s heavy breathing, the building’s lobby still functioning with people going in and out, the sounds from the street when the door was opened; it was silent between them, anyway. Harlan wasn’t quick to defend himself, which should have made Honey feel better than it did. She’d been right and he wasn’t saying anything to the contrary because he knew she was. But there was also that part-confession from her, too, that she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

And even though she knew she was right, and knew that he knew, it caught her off guard to hear him admit it. He— didn’t finish his thought, and Honey didn’t miss him looking over her shoulder, straightening up, checking his watch. If she hadn’t caught him obviously on his way out, she might have thought his date must have just walked through the door.

Even if his date wasn’t coming here, that’s what he was dressed for, wasn’t it? She knew he didn’t wear cologne for just any outing, anyway. “What?” Honey’s eyebrows went up. Was he genuinely asking her to walk him to his date? “Yes.” It counted as thinking about her, if that’s what he meant.

“I won’t keep you,” she said, exasperated. “I’ll be there Saturday but it’s not because of you.” Maybe she could find a date, someone to bring to the match, as if she thought Harlan would be paying any attention to her during it. She still had a few days to figure it out.

She took a step back toward the door, giving Harlan one last look—she hoped it conveyed that she didn’t want him to follow her—before she turned to leave. She left past the doorman quicker than she entered, wanting to get home or to a pub as fast as she could.

[[ out ]]

Harlan figured as much.

His smile didn't falter. Instead, he watched Honey and the way that her face shifted with the tone of her voice, the blues of his eyes hitting the light from outside the lobby. He didn't (and certifiably couldn't) blame her for shutting it down. In truth, he was surprised that she had turned up there at all. If the point she was trying to get across was that they needed to stop seeing each other at any capacity, there was a much simpler way of doing it, he thought. But he was glad that she hadn't.

"Right," He nodded, and he believed it too. Honey would have been at the match, either way, but she might as well have a good view.

"Keep the Griffins wear at home, though..." He mentioned with a smirk as she turned on her heels after one last look. It was all the ammunition he needed for the match. Losing was not going to be an option, not after their conversation and not after knowing that she would be in the crowd. Harlan opened his mouth to say that it had been nice to see her but he closed it just as quickly, a warning look from Sydney giving him pause. It hadn't really been all that nice, anyway, though he supposed that was the point.

fin