If I time it right, the thunder breaks when I open my mouth • { d e a n }

APRIL

Dennis was rubbish at writing letters. Honestly, he was pretty rubbish at speaking in person too, but at least in person he didn't have countless hours to revise and rewrite and destroy the things he wanted to say. In writing, everything seemed to carry a different sort of weight. It was permanent, inflexible. Dennis found himself pouring over the shortest and most inconsequential letters for hours, trying to choose the correct words and imagining the reader going over his words and trying to decipher his meaning. He'd often end up with scrunched up bits of paper all over the floor. Dennis couldn't write things like "uh, sure" in letters. He had to commit. And he had no idea how to open and close letters either, on paper everything looked too flippant or too serious.

Love from Dennis

- Dennis

Cheers,
Dennis

Regards,
Dennis

The last one made him snort to think about. It was just so formal. No one had ever taught him how to write letters. When he and Colin had to write letters to their parents, his older brother had taken care of most of the actual writing, and Dennis, ever distracted, would simply contribute some ideas and information for him to transcribe into a letter format. Nowadays, Dennis didn't have a lot of people to write to. Just Dean, really. Don't be stupid, his older friend had written at the end of his last letter, it's just as much my fault. But Dennis knew himself and he knew Dean and he couldn't really bring himself to agree. He mulled over this as he glanced at his friend before turning his eyes back to the window of the cafe they'd stopped outside.

Madam Puddifoot's was not the type of place Dennis would usually go in Hogsmeade. He'd been relieved to learn that it wasn't the sort of place Clem wanted to go either, though he obviously would have gone if it was what she liked. He wasn't picky about where they were, really. When he hung out with her he didn't tend to focus on their environment. Today, however, Hogsmeade was bustling with a ridiculous amount of people for some reason, and the Three Broomsticks was full to the brim. So despite having met there, now they were outside the rather pink, frilly shop, glancing in. "There are some tables in there..." Dennis said reluctantly, glancing at his friend.

“It’s not that bad, really,” said Dean with amusement, peering in the window of Madam Puddifoot’s. “Ugly, yeah, but their food’s alright.” He laughed and glanced at Dennis. “Went in one time to see if the coffee was any better than Three Broomsticks… Must’ve been fourteen or fifteen; we didn’t know it’d got a reputation… Seamus and I, I mean.” Dean shook his head and chuckled to himself. “Never went back after that, obviously.” He didn’t miss the insecurity of his teenage years—at least the portion of it that had gone.

Dean opened the door of the shop, bell tinkling merrily. It was warm inside even in the springtime, and perhaps a little more empty as a result. There was only one other booth taken by a young couple. Dean led Dennis as far away from them as the furniture would allow, and sat on the squashy bench to ask for a coffee and currant scone.

“Your girlfriend not the type that likes this, then?” Dean asked teasingly. He beamed, sort of delighted to be able to talk about these things with Dennis now. It was so much lighter, so much more cheerful than their usual. But after he’d read the letter, though, Dean had been a little worried about it. He hoped Dennis’s first relationship went rather better than his own had, of course he did, but there was a strong likelihood of disaster. Or even less than disaster: disappointment at the least. He still wasn’t sure about Dennis’s ability to handle that.

“Glad you’ve been well,” he said, inspecting his freshly-arrived coffee. He couldn’t let on any doubts. Dennis had contacted him first, and Dean wasn’t going to make him regret it this time if it killed him. “School going okay?” he asked just to ask something, and then smiled again. “Or do you, y’know, care?” Neither of them were much for academics. Dean certainly wasn’t going to get on his back about homework.

He looked past Dennis out the window at the packed street outside the inn. “What d’you reckon’s going on over there, anyway?” he asked. “They giving away something free?”

"Yeah," Dennis breathed, unconvinced. He followed his friend inside. "Oh no," he said, smiling at the story with far more earnestness than he might have a year ago, given the parallels between then and now. The teenager took his seat across from his friend, copying Dean's order rather than bother with the menu himself. "Nah, Clem's quidditch co-captain," Dennis said with half a smile, "she plays beater." He was grateful that she wasn't a roses and poetry kind of girl. He certainly didn't know how to be a roses and poetry kind of guy. Dennis hadn't really done any of that sort of romancey crap with her - he hadn't even gotten her anything for Christmas, the hoodie he'd stolen from an expensive store a month prior in preparation of her "borrowing" it notwithstanding. "This -" he motioned to the room around them without looking at it. "- isn't really her aesthetic." Their idea of a romantic date was more like getting drunk and making out against the outer walls of Hogwarts at night. Or at least, it had been, until she'd decided to pull back a bit on the drinking thing. At least... he hoped she didn't want more of this flowery, fluffy stuff. He'd be happy to comply of it made her happy, but he had never gotten that vibe from her.

Dennis nodded slowly at Dean's next words. This year had been a lot better than last year so far. Since January, really, things had been going pretty smoothly. Since he and Clementine had gotten together officially. The teenager leaned back in his chair, relaxing a bit. Of course, he had a lot of mixed feelings about that, and smooth for Dennis wasn't exactly the dictionary definition of the word. Given his history with people - friends, family - smooth tended to cover anything that wasn't a horrible disaster. He'd been overthinking more than usual recently (never a good sign) and that was part of the reason that he'd asked Dean here today. Still, that topic could wait a little longer. "Yeah it's fine I guess," he said with a shrug. Better than last year in that he felt like he actually existed, was present, wasn't completely depressed and drifting the whole time. Worse in that he was often distracted by a certain blonde and often opted into spending time with her rather than actually studying or working on assignments.

"I mean..." he leaned in again, resting his forearms first on the table, then resting his cheek in one palm instead. He gave his friend a lazy smile "...I've not given up on it just yet." Only few more months until the end of term, he thought, and only a few more until his dreaded NEWT year. Then... well, after that he had no idea. Dennis took a sip of his newly-arrived coffee and winced when it was too hot. He put it down on the table again. "I think it's a celebrity thing," he said, glancing out the window as he tried to remember the details. One of Clementine's friends had mentioned it but he couldn't remember the name of the band. Dennis didn't listen to much music from the wizarding world; at the moment he was more into stuff like Eminem and Linkin Park. He hesitated for a moment, just staring out of the window before speaking again. "So I read your thing in the paper," Dennis said, flicking his mottled browny-green eyes back to his friend curiously. "I bet that was a fun interview."

Dean grinned in amusement, the look on Dennis’s face reminding him so acutely of his own school years. It looked wonderful on him. “Sounds fun,” said Dean, his tone lingeringly inquisitive. Normally he wouldn’t lay it on so thick. But they’d had very few conversations of this kind in their friendship. He felt a little obligated to take the piss.

But then Dennis asked about his interview, and Dean’s smile started to fade. “Oh,” he said blankly. “Right. I did that.” Anyone who knew him would have been able to recognize his story from Edith’s brief, angry words, but he’d started hoping people would just overlook that part of the paper. Plenty seemed to.

“It was, you know…” he said, breaking his scone in half. “Rough. Not so rough as she makes it sound, but—you know how just talking about it is.” He wasn’t sure Dennis had ever told anyone his own war story straight through, but he had heard Dean’s. The first summer Dennis stayed Dean had done a lot of talking. “I said a lot, actually,” he said. He’d sat there telling @Edith Holthouse about the football match in Southhampton for probably five fucking minutes, thought he might have even mused on God somewhere at the end like he had any idea what he was talking about. Open and unscripted, yes, but far more dramatic than he’d ever been with—well, anyone like Dennis. He’d never been trying to…testify in that way before. “Sort of wish she’d published it all.”

Edith had been a good listener. And of course Dean was furious there were Ministry collaborators still in power. But in the end, he thought they’d misunderstood each other. He’d expected a detailed account, a sworn statement in newspaper ink, part of a collection of stories from others told just so that the world would remember. Martha-Ann Jones had needed some misery to fill in the gaps in her declaration of war. It wasn’t a cause Dean was unwilling to be associated with. He wouldn’t have told her less if he’d known her style. But he wouldn’t have felt that silly bit of disappointment that his story had been stripped of him to be made so.

“Bit worried I might’ve unwittingly abetted a bomb threat or something, but, well.” Dean chuckled weakly. “I guess we’ll see how it goes.” He didn’t really believe Edith to be capable of anything but justified rage—or at least he hoped so enough to joke about it. A faint nervousness remained in his stomach anyway.

"Yeah," Dennis said, straightening up a bit and reaching for his drink to have something to do with his hands. The tone shifted a bit; it was his fault for bringing it up. Just talking about it was hard, Dean said. Dennis had never done that, really. It had taken him a long time, that first time, to even say a word; he'd listened, mostly, and been grateful to be allowed to do so. "I mean, not that I... Really have a story like that," he amended quickly, offering a slight shrug. It was true; Dennis hadn't really been on the run that year, he'd just been in muggle school. Sure, the wait and the not-knowing and his fading belief in Colin's strongly-held convictions had grated at him, changed him, but it wasn't the same. Dennis only had a war story in the way that everyone did; he didn't have one like Dean's.

The teenager's gaze was drawn away from Dean and back out to the rest of the cafe momentarily as a waitress moved past him, taking something to the young couple in the booth on the other side of the room. They were currently lip-locked across the table, and pink petals were inexplicably falling from the ceiling above them. He grimaced pointedly at his friend, his initial discomfort at the topic of conversation shifting fairly easily into a more comical discomfort at their environment. Dennis raised his mug to his lips, then paused. "Sorry if it didn't go the way you expected," Dennis said over his coffee, wondering what other words Dean had said that he'd wanted to be written down. He sipped his drink, not burning his tongue this time.

"So..." he started, turning over everything Dean had just said. "She's a muggleborn, right? Martha-whatever?" He didn't know why he'd assumed it; perhaps because it was something that would have mattered to him if, by some unholy twist of fate, he somehow arrived at a similar position. He didn't want to talk about that stuff at all, really. Hadn't done much of it with Dean, even less so with Clem. But if he ever did, he couldn't see himself giving an interview to anyone who didn't share his background. Didn't fully appreciate the context of his words.