[Feb '01 MP] from this valley {Dennis}

Everything still felt surreal. Access to civilization outside of the Hogwarts grounds, not having to forage for food… and especially the absence of a certain shimmering dome overhead, and all of the indescribable horror that had gone with it.

Going home was wonderful, especially since she had – against her will – missed out on the annual Doyle and Regan festivities this year; for that reason, the immediate Doyle family had decided to have something akin to Christmas-in-February to celebrate Keela’s and Faolan’s homecoming after giving them some time to recover and re-acclimate. Since neither Gryffindor had gotten a chance to Christmas-shop (though their parents, Eamon, and Colleen had all insisted it was completely unnecessary and that their safe return had been the ideal gift), the two youngest Doyle siblings had opted to make a short trip to Diagon Alley before dinner that evening in an effort to restore a sense of normalcy. They had started off together but eventually went their separate ways, agreeing to meet back at the Leaky Cauldron by 4pm.

Keela had finished her shopping in a reasonable amount of time so, as per usual, she made her way over to Quality Quidditch Supplies to browse their inventory. She then had moseyed outside, bought a mug of hot apple-and-pumpkin cider from a vendor, and sat down on a bench outside to sip at it, reveling in the brisk February air after being inside the warm shops for so long wearing so many layers.
At 3:45, she decided to make her way back to the Cauldron, and she had just set off in its direction when she noted a now-very-familiar figure a block or two ahead of her. Regardless of when she had last seen them, Keela always enjoyed coincidental run-ins with people she knew.

“Oi! Dennis!” she called out without hesitation, throwing up her free arm to flag him down as she hurried to catch up. Her cheeks were pink from the cold and she could hardly feel her face, but she grinned brightly anyways. She knew of Dennis superficially through Faolan, Freya, and Danny, but had spent more time with the older boy over the past few weeks: they had worked together closely alongside Freya and others during the Gauntlet’s final assault on its inhabitants.
It was common knowledge by now that his older brother Colin – who had been a Year below Eamon – had been killed during the Battle of Hogwarts. Understandably, Dennis had taken some time away from the wizarding world before return at the beginning of this past term – and what a horrific homecoming that had turned out to be, given the events of term thus far. His reappearance led her to initially feel unsure as how to interact with him, consciously and unconsciously, but this abated considerably once they began working together more closely. On more than one occasion, Keela felt a detached and occasionally reckless vibe from him; but when the going got tough, the quiet strength that he radiated was undeniable. That, to Keela, was truly admirable.

“Enjoying some well-deserved freedom?” she inquired, waggling her eyebrows playfully.

Diagon alley still made him anxious.

Dennis could count the amount of times he’d been here on one hand and every single time had been tumultuous in one way or another. Before his first year at Hogwarts, Dennis had come with his brother and his parents and he’d almost wet himself with excitement. It was so strange to contrast the memory of that visit with the last couple of times he’d been here. Now, as he made his way slowly through the crowd, the excitement of it all made him feel anxious enough to make him uncomfortable and nostalgic enough to make him upset. It was one of those places heavily laden with memories and Dennis had a hard enough time as it was escaping his own head. He knew he spent far too much time reminiscing.

Today, he’d bought some school robes. While he wasn’t a particularly tall guy, it seemed that he had grown since purchasing the old robes – the sleeves stopped several inches above his wrists. He’d opted for second-hand ones because they were cheaper and he wasn’t about to fork out a bunch of cash for new robes when he wasn’t even sure if he’d be returning to school next year. Not that the cash he has was hard-won, exactly. Dennis was sure there were probably laws about scamming muggles out of cash with magic and then going to Gringotts and exchanging pounds for sickles, but he didn’t have a lot of options at the moment. He’d discovered that the account he and his brother had shared was still there, with a small handful of coins sitting inside too. Now that he was done, Dennis was planning on heading back out into the muggle world and back to his muggle hostel.

Dennis paused as he moved past a quidditch shop. He stood in front of the window, muddy green-brown eyes transfixed on the newest, flashiest broomstick hovering in the shop window. A slight frown marked his forehead, but he was so still that the only part of him that was moving was his hair as it was tousled gently by the wind. He’d played quidditch when he was an underclassman, but he’d been too enthusiastic and silly to ever dream of making it onto the school team. Colin had gone through a short phase of wanting to play, but he hadn’t been very good either, from memory. Besides, they’d never been able to afford something like a decent broomstick.

Dennis wondered what he would have done if he’d been left with his brother’s broomstick after he’d died, along with the other stuff. Chess set, he thought. Gobstones. Camera. A pair of quidditch-themed socks. Dennis blinked, breaking the spell his own mind seemed to hold over him. Moving away from the shop, Dennis tried to remember which team Colin had liked enough that he’d bought a pair of socks with their logo on it. The seventeen year old made his way down Diagon alley, distancing himself from that shop intentionally. It was strange that the name didn’t immediately jump to mind. 

After a moment, he felt awash with relief. Puddlemere United, he thought, the words drifting back after years of hiding somewhere out of touch. That was the team that Colin had decided to follow – for whatever reason – and naturally, Dennis had claimed the team as his own also. He’d always gone along with Colin, following his brother like some kind of pop idol or something. Quidditch had never really mattered to him, which was probably why it had been so easy to forget his old favourite team. All of Colin’s socks were red except for that pair, he remembered vaguely.

Dennis almost jumped when someone called his name. He’d gotten into the practice of mentally distancing himself from other people around him over the past couple of weeks. Being alone for that amount of time had made the behaviour habitual – it was easy to forget that they were all people when you never talked to them, he thought. The Gryffindor turned to find Keela Doyle smiling and waving at him as if being here was the most normal thing in the world and he couldn’t decide if he felt relieved or dysphoric. Dennis forced what looked like a casual, easy half-smile and slowed as she caught up to him.

“Something like that,” he replied casually, holding up his shopping bags as an explanation. “School stuff.” Dennis glanced down at her shopping bags, glad that he was running into her at a time when he was actually showered with brushed teeth and clean clothes, even if he had had to wash them the slow, muggle way. “How about you?” Keela had looked like she was going somewhere, so he started walking again, falling into step with her easily.

“Belated Christmas presents,” she replied with a grin, following his gaze down to the bags in her own hands and copying him, lifting them slightly in gesture. “Faolan and I insisted, since we missed out on the… ah, usual festivities.”

Unbidden, fragmented recollections of this past Christmas and New Years’ and the full-scale assault that followed came rushing to the surface of her memory. She glanced up at Dennis’s face, and for a fleeting moment she saw it illuminated only by wandlight and tensed, waiting; as it had appeared for so many nights, when they would conduct raids. Once again she felt the bone-jarring THUD of the creature that had thrown itself into the Fat Lady’s portrait, demanding entry into the Gryffindor Common Room, while she was pressed flat to it in hopes of barring its path. As if a sixteen-year-old girl could stop something from the bowels of Hell itself with just the determined bulk of her body.
The echo of a primal roar reverberated in her brain as Nathalie’s terrified expression flashed in her mind’s eye. Keela fought back a shudder of revulsion.

Her throat tightened and she was forced to give a hasty cough into her elbow, hoping to disguise it.
“But that’s over now,” she murmured softly, mostly to herself.
Suddenly remembering where she was, she looked up apologetically and shrugged one shoulder. He had fallen into step beside her so she continued along, doing her best to gracefully pick up where she’d left off – but not finding herself particularly successful.

“Er, anyways… How are things?” she began lamely, but not without genuine interest. “Settling back in alright?”

"Oh yeah," Dennis responded, muddy green eyes flicking down to her bags as he wondered what Christmas usually looked like at her house. Like everything, thoughts of Christmas were tainted with discomfort for Dennis. Christmas hadn't felt right to him since his third year. He hadn't seen his family for such a long time, and while the Hogwarts festivities had really made him wish he was at home with them, he still hadn't contacted them since the dome had gone down. What was he supposed to say? That he'd almost died multiple times? That he'd put himself in harm's way? When Dennis had wanted to go back to Hogwarts, his parents had been so against it and last Christmas he'd almost felt it too.

Settling back into what, he wondered? In the breaks, Dennis basically returned to the muggle world as a despondent youth, absently making his way around the streets of his city. Yesterday he'd washed the few clothes he owned in a coin operated machine at the hostel he'd stolen money to stay at. Was that alright settling? Stealing money from muggles for shelter? It was so easy, he'd discovered. Dennis hadn't ever thought of himself as someone who'd wander the length of Oxford street or the financial district looking to nick a few quid from unsuspecting tourists and businessmen respectively, but nothing in his life had really gone the way he'd wanted or expected, had it? The school board had organised a kind of scholarship for him so that he could buy new robes and other school supplies each year but he hadn't told them that he didn't go home in the breaks. That he didn't really have a home to go to.

"Yeah," he responded distantly, not even completely sure what he was answering anymore. Trying to snap himself out of the spell he was under, Dennis glanced at Keela as they walked, then turned his eyes ahead again. "How 'bout yourself?" He asked. It felt strange to actually talk to someone after spending the past couple of weeks drifting. He'd been disassociating hard, too, abstracting everything so much that he didn't feel like any of it had been real, or perhaps like he, Dennis, was not real. Maintaining so much mental distance between himself and the bodies around him left him fumbling as he tried to being himself back to the conversation at hand.

At the tone of Dennis’s reply, Keela felt the tiniest wave of relief; she clearly wasn’t the only one who occasionally struggled to stay in the present. When he turned the question back on her, she briefly cast him a sidelong glance before letting out a long, low sigh.

“I mean, well enough, I s’pose. Still feels surreal.” She shrugged heavily. It was true. Some days it was hard to believe the dome had actually happened; some days, it was harder to remember that it was actually over.
“Though I can’t say I haven’t woken up in the middle of the night on more than one occasion, thinking it’s time for my watch…”

She fell silent at that, and they continued on in tandem for another dozen or so strides. With each step she further regretted even alluding to the dome in the first place, and so casually at that. Could she think of no other conversational topic? Keela wanted nothing more than to wipe those few months from her memory; but at times it was almost a compulsion to mull over it endlessly. Something had to give.

“Anyway,” she began again, albeit rather abruptly in her intent to change the tone of their run-in. “Mam’s insisted on having a celebratory dinner – even Eamon and Colleen are coming home for it. Faolan and I are on our way back to the Cauldron now and Flooing home from there.” She paused momentarily to adjust her grip on her bags when a sudden thought struck her.

“You should come! Mam loves company, and she’s a hell of a cook. Dad’s not half-bad, either… I heard him say something about steaks and pot roast as we were leaving.” Keela grinned, bumping him lightly with her shoulder. “He does make a mean roast, I’ll give him that.”

FEB 2001

His thoughts lingered on the question about settling. He felt his emotional reactions happen slowly, like he hadn't been feeling much of anything before and was now needing to remember how to respond to things. Truthfully, he didn't feel settled at all. He thought of Dean for a very brief moment and then shut that down immediately.

Dennis felt her eyes on him and wondered what she was thinking; had he been completely unconvincing? Did she pity him? Or perhaps she understood that "settling" was the thing here that was inappropriate as a concept, rather than any response to the question. "Right," he said quietly, sure as soon as he said it that he wasn't doing anything to help convince her that he was doing well, or at least coping at all. Everything did feel surreal, but he didn't want to talk about it. He was nervous that she'd push to talk. His skin crawled when she mentioned waking up in the night.

He didn't say anything, or look at her, until she shifted tone.

"Sorry?" he asked, hearing her properly but needing to double check that she meant it. He looked at her, a bit surprised. "Oh, I - I dunno..." he trailed off, but when she bumped his shoulder lightly he looked back at her to find her grinning. Belatedly, he returned her smile with an uneven half-smile of his own.

“Come to dinner!” she repeated in earnest, brushing right past his hesitation, emboldened by the tiny hint of a smile she seemed to have elicited. Her grin widened at his surprised expression. “Please. And it’s no trouble, so don’t even float the supposition,” she warned, eyebrows lifting as she fixed him with a poignant look. “Honestly, Mam actually tells me off when I don’t bring friends over. We always tease her that four kids are clearly not enough for her.”

She jerked her head towards the Cauldron, which was just coming into view as they rounded a corner. Keela waggled her eyebrows.
“You wouldn’t be so ruthless as to set me up for a scolding by my own mam, now, would you?”

“I - “ she cut him off, and he gave a bit of an embarrassed smile, one cheek dimpling. He had been just about to protest for that exact reason. Dennis Creevey refused to be a burden, but she was pretty insistent that he wouldn’t be.

It was difficult, actually. A part of him wanted to jump at this chance. He felt starved for attention, starved for interaction. He’d been so deeply inside his own head that even talking to her just now had been work. That was the flipside, though. The thought of showing up to this event full of strangers made him feel mildly sick.

“Um,” he started. Dennis met her eye, looking for some kind of reassurance that she meant it, that she wasn’t just offering politely. That he wouldn’t be a burden. That it would be okay. “I… Sure,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. He offered a tentative smile, and let her take the lead.

/end

His hesitation made her even more determined; and not just because she liked ‘winning’. It wasn’t the first time that she’d wondered about his life outside of school, wondered anyone’s life outside of school who had lost a family member. Goodness knew she had plenty of family to go around. But at the same time, it wasn’t like she wanted him to feel as though he was a charity case or anything of the sort. She genuinely liked the other Gryffindor, and wanted him to feel as welcome as any of her other friends or schoolmates. The past few months certainly hadn’t been easy on anyone.

“Excellent!” she beamed as he finally conceded. “Don’t worry, Mam won’t bombard you with any questions that aren’t: ‘D’ye want seconds?’ or ‘Had ye had enough to eat, lad?’ She loves to feed people…”

Her heart feeling a bit lighter, she shifted her bags slightly again and set off, Dennis falling comfortably into step beside her.

[[ Keela out! ]]