hello miss lonesome, i see you're back in town [ezra]

He was nineteen years old. Prime of his youth, unfortunately as good-looking as he’d ever be, time to binge-drink and have flings or whatever. Don’t you want to have fun? his dad would ask as Henry played cards with his grandparents at the kitchen table. Good old wild Brian Murphy, mystified by his awkward son.

Henry had grown up with a deep notion of guilt around it. He’d wanted to be like his dad when he was younger, or like the cool older Gryffindors who pulled pranks and held parties. And then later he’d wanted to want to be. And now as an adult he saved his coolness for whenever the guilt rose back up in him, every now and then.

When Henry got to feeling like he should have real-person fun, he went where the real fun people lived. Henry knocked on the Tates’ door and rocked back on his heels. Obviously it would be a massive annoyance but Muggles were lucky, weren’t they, that they could tell how loud a place was from the outside? Most of the time his cool friends were open to socializing but it would be nice to have an idea whether music was playing inside before he asked about it.

Jam’s friend Ezra Cohen opened the door. “Hi,” said Henry. “You lot busy tonight, or is it alright if I come over?”

There was not any music playing inside. In fact it looked much barer than usual, belongings-wise. Had they cleaned? (Baby-proofed?) Henry craned his neck to look further in, too interested to worry about rudeness. “Wow," he said. "What've you done with the place?”

@Ezra Cohen

It was empty in the apartment lately. Quiet, a lot more than usual, and Ezra was everything but completely miserable. He poured over his homework, quietly, sober. He was trying to study, as the first year final exams were coming up. He wanted to do well, even if he really didn’t feel passionate about law school at all. He missed his friends a little bit, but he was also very angry at them. Jam, his best friend for eight years, had left him over a girl. Ezra was angry, but trying to forget. He heard a knock at the door, and closed his textbook. Well, he was done for the night anyway, he thought. 
 
He had been hanging around some of his other friends more than usual lately. Gene, particularly, was a target. He had gone so far as to invite himself over to family dinners at Gene’s house (his parents really liked Ezra, or at least Ezra thought so). He was owling the poor boy every day, going out to bars, drinking a lot, and being stoned more than ever. Today, though, he was bone dry. He was anxious, too. 
 
When he opened the door, he was surprised to see Henry there. Henry was one of Gene’s friends, one of Jam’s former roommates. He wasn’t foreign to the apartment. He came over to hang sometimes, and Ezra enjoyed his company. Still, he felt odd seeing him here, knowing there was no one else in the house. 
 
“Oh, hey Henry. Come on in, I’m not busy.” He offered, noticing the other looking around at the empty, quiet flat. Ezra cleared his throat. “I… well, Jam and Janae moved out?” He offered, not explaining. “So it’s just me now.” 
 
He opened the door wide for the other to come in. “You want a drink or something?” 

Ezra welcomed him in and Henry stepped into the empty flat. He got one arm out of his jacket, and then Ezra finished explaining.

“They moved out?” Ezra had tried, valiantly, to move on from that, and Henry felt sort of bad for not letting him, but personally he could not let this revelation slide without comment. “All of them? What happened?”

He slowly extricated himself from the rest of his jacket and considered. “Was it about the, y’know—baby?” It had been months and Henry still hadn’t figured out how to talk about it. Janae’s pregnancy had unsettled him significantly. Not that he had any idea what her plans were in that regard, but he could definitely understand not wanting to go through something like that in a home like this. And maybe he brother going along made sense?

But Ezra didn’t seem to be doing well at all. Friends moving out might’ve done it, but it seemed worse than that. “Or did something happen?” Henry asked. It was hard to imagine—Jam and Janae and Ezra had been close since he could remember.

He hadn’t been prepared to offer comfort, so he hoped it was nothing. But he started working himself down from party mode just in case. "Er, sure," he said. "Beer? Or whatever."

Ezra cringed a little at Henry’s statement despite himself. Yeah, they moved out. It had been a huge betrayal for Ezra and he ached every time he thought about it. He cleared his throat. Best to deal with the elephant in the room right away, he guessed. “Ahhh…. It’s a long story. Basically, I dated Circe for a while and she dumped me and said that she was doing me a favor, I guess. Took the fam with her when she went. At least, I am pretty sure that was what happened. Maybe they got tired of living for free and enduring my presence—anyway! Yeah, a beer.” He turned away, awkwardly, and went to the fridge to rummage for something that wasn’t Jam’s cheap, crappy brand. He meant to throw it out, but was a little sentimental. It made him think of Jam to see that cheap beer in the fridge. Ezra, on the other hand, typically drank better quality beer. He was a spoiled rich boy at heart, despite himself, and liked finer things. 
 
“Here, try this.” He offered, unsure if Henry had ever tried this particular brand. It was Ezra’s go-to, but he sometimes forgot that not everyone drank higher bar than Pabst Blue Ribbon or Bud Light. “Come take a seat? I was working on some stuff for school, but I can totally take a break. In fact, I would love a break.” He admitted. His head was spinning. “Want to split a bowl?” He offered, nodding to the pipe sitting on the coffee table. 
 
“We could watch a movie or something, if you want, or I could even change into something street-worthy and we could try to hit up a pub if you’d rather?” He would offer to let Henry just go, since clearly there was no party here tonight, but greedily, he wanted the other to stay. He was very lonely, and it probably showed. Ezra was an extrovert and needed people around him to entertain in order to survive. He had little energy by himself, and felt drained and depressed in silence. 
 
“Or… are you in a rush?” He wondered, despite not wanting to give the other an out. 

“You’re shitting me.” Henry leaned against the table, rapt. Friend groups that dated each other were endlessly fascinating to him. He was glad (or perhaps, just forcing himself to be glad) that he’d never been part of one, of course: it had long seemed to him that romance brought out everyone’s worst behavior. If even a gang like this could get fucked up because of it…

The friend who’d been abandoned by the rest didn’t seem like an ideal source of insight on the matter. Henry made a mental note (he would surely forget about immediately) to owl Janae later. Ezra didn’t seem to be in the most stable of states at the moment and it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine he’d been cut off for a reason. But as Henry had always known him to be nice enough, and as he simply had to know as much as he could about this particular drama as quickly as possible, he thought it couldn’t hurt to give Ezra the benefit of the doubt. “Do you know why?”

Ezra’s flippant self-loathing made Henry tense up uncomfortably. He was never sure how to handle it when people got like that. Agreeing was nonsense, obviously. He hadn’t even insulted half the people he knew that actually deserved it. But refuting it didn’t seem entirely helpful either. Self-deprecation like that was a trap and though he’d run into it in so many of his peers, Henry hadn’t yet found a good solution.

He just ignored it.

“A bowl of what?” he said stupidly, as if there might be ice cream, but recognition hit him just a second too late to keep that in. He wasn’t used to the vocabulary of smoking. “Right,” he mumbled, flushed, “er, sure, yeah.” He took a sip his beer to hide his self-consciousness in. This would be far easier when he was drunk.

He sat down on one side of the couch, more politely than a couch deserved. “You have movies?” he asked. “Here?” It shouldn’t have surprised him. Ezra may not have gone into a Muggle Studies-related field, but Henry knew the other boy had always been far more of a natural at it than he had himself. “Are there any I should be able to make conversation with Muggles about?” His enthusiast father had taken him to the cinema a few times as a child, and his mother had a television at her house, but Henry still hadn’t mastered even a fraction of the pop culture knowledge base one seemed to need to get through to people these days.

He'd begun looking around for a stack of whatever films might be stored in, but Ezra was asking now if he was in a hurry. “What? Of course I’m not.” Henry laughed. “Why do you think I came over, just to look in?” He took another sip. “I mean, unless you want me to leave, obviously…”

Probably they were just both a couple of shitheads afraid to be burdens, but he still felt he should make sure.

Ezra sighed a little, but kept his smile on for Henry. “Ehh, she thought I was going to cheat... I guess?” He shrugged. “I didn’t cheat.” He maintained. “She thought that I wanted to, though, so she left me. She… wasn’t totally wrong, I guess, but that doesn’t mean that I did it.” He sighed. “Anyway, I’m sure you aren’t here just to hear about the saga of Circe and Ezra.” He laughed, but it was dry. He perked up when Henry agreed to smoke with him but also at the excitement about the films he had. “Oh yeah, tons.” He smiled. “I mean, sometimes the TV would fritz when there were like 4 wizards living here, but now it’s just me and it works pretty good usually.” He admitted. “I love muggle stuff, you know? It’s like a passion.” He showed off his collection of movies, mostly comedy and horror.

“And no, I don’t want you to leave at all. I just… well, we’re not exactly the party flat right now.” He admitted with a sigh. He loaded up the bowl and offered it to Henry first. “Any suggestions for films?” He asked, sitting rather close to him. He loved the physical closeness of another human being for the time being.

“Do you like scary things? Comedy? Action? I have the 1989 Batman film which is a classic. I mean, I dunno if you even know who that is. Some rich guy who fights crime. No superpowers, just special equipment. The villains though are pretty amazing….”