[dahliental] les nuits étoilées || prosper

Prosper looked at Léon just then, wondering for the first time how heavy the pressure must be for him. What was it like to be the youngest of four sons, where three of them had turned out as varying degrees of failures? Surely by now their father had learned something, had backed off somewhat? For a few years now, Prosper had been skeptical of his parents’ marriage. He wondered if he could talk about something like that with Léon - he, like Prosper, clearly had a favourite parent.

“That’s true,” Prosper said, responding to the point about not seeing people after graduating. “The good ones stay,” he pointed out, hoping that Léon actually had some good ones amongst the rest. Prosper was still friends with Zara, for example, and Diederik, of course. He still saw Emil and Caspar. There were even girls he’d been with in the past who he’d stayed friends with.

“I don’t know if that’s always true though,” he added, responding to Léon’s last comment. Prosper shifted a bit, straightening up to stretch his back before leaning back again, resting on his palms. He thought of Ari, who had been pretty much a stranger when he’d started seeing her at the end of the year before last. There were others, but she came to mind first, of course. “Who hurt you, little brother,” he teased gently, bumping léon’s shoulder again softly.

There had to be some truth in what Prosper said, after all his older brother had always been surrounded by people, some of those with which he went way back. Léon didn’t know if that would be the case. He had done a lot of socializing, that much was true, but had failed to make real, true connections with most of them. Gabby, maybe? Based on their last conversation she probably still thought he was phony. Cosimo? The two were best mates, but even with him, Léon felt particularly wary of discussing specific topics. The young wizard had a propensity to avoid getting hurt by hiding behind a façade. Apart from his own family, and not all of the members at that, he still felt a sense of vulnerability when discussing more private matters of the heart.

He grinned, “Nobody’s hurt me, per say,” he clarified. There really wasn’t one person in particularly he was talking about, but for some reason all of these things, what felt like years of a burden he never wanted to speak of, finally came down even harder on his shoulders after the fight. “I guess I just wish it was easy for me, like it is to you, to be so open with people about everything,” he explained slowly, not really sure how to really say how he felt. Maybe he was simply being dramatic about the entire situation, making things harder on himself because he was too afraid to get hurt.

But Léon liked to believe that something was keeping him from being himself, maybe something that went deeper than simple fear of disappointment or rejection. Like there was something he hadn’t figured out that he needed to look into immediately. “Gotta do a little soul searching,” he concluded before turning to Prosper. “You do a lot of that after graduation?” It was difficult to believe that Prosper would do such things, he had always seemed to have everything figured out.

“Are you worried about how they’ll react?” Prosper asked curiously, tapping Léon’s arm gently with the wine bottle as he tried to pass it off. No point getting wine drunk up here by himself, he thought. “Who are your friends these days anyway?” he asked, trying to remember who Léon’s friends had been, and trying not to confuse them with Adrien’s.

Prosper wondered how to answer that. He dropped in and out of contact with his little brother usually, so it probably went unnoticed when he’d disappeared for four months a couple of years ago. Léon knew that Zoé and Pierce were together - or had been then, anyway, Prosper hadn’t heard from Pierce for a long time - and he had to know that Prosper hadn’t been over the moon about that, but he didn’t talk about things like his work with his little brother, so it made sense that he didn’t know. Prosper thanked his mother silently for not telling everyone everything that was happening in his life.

“For sure,” Prosper answered. “Honestly, it still feels like a work in progress.” It would be a lie to say that his relationship with Ariane wasn’t a steady, beating force that shaped the way he saw himself, and his future, though.

“I got my dream part in a show once, and then walked out of it without telling anyone,” he offered. He’d also punched Pierce in the face that day, but he didn’t feel the need to bring that up if it hadn’t filtered its way back to Léon already. Plus, he didn’t feel particularly bad about that part. “I went partying all through europe, hooked up with exes…” Léon must have remembered Luciana, she’d was his longest lasting girlfriend before Ariane. “So I kind of trashed my name, and am only starting to fix that stuff now. Mend bridges and all that.” He paused for a moment, then added, "fucked up in a few different ways straight out of school."

Léon took the wine bottle from his brothers hand, taking a more generous sip this time as he shrugged his shoulders, not really sure if that was his exact concern but he supposed it was a big part of it. “Cosimo, mostly, some of the people on the team, some of the girls when they can stand me, I get around,” he said nonchalantly. His group of friends hadn’t changed since the very beginning, though that probably had more to do with the fact that Léon had rarely made the effort. He had grown accustomed to the people that he had started Beauxbatons, expanding his circle just seemed much more work than it was worth.

“Still looks like you got all the answers,” he continued takin another swig at the bottle as he considered it. Léon often shared his concerns with their mother but she didn’t make it a habit of referencing the struggles of his older siblings. Therefore, it only seemed natural to believe that everything was going well in his older sibling’s lives.

"Why'd you walk out?" He listened to Prosper’s words closely, wondering if he would go as far as to roam around Europe from party to party looking for an answer to his personal issues. He certainly thought that it would be a fun experience and maybe that’s what he need to feel a little more in control of his own life. Léon felt like he had already made plenty of mistakes, it didn’t feel possible that Prosper’s outnumbered his own. “But it helped, right? Even if there were mistakes,” he said, hoping to reassure himself. “Anyway it’s too late to go back a different person, nobody’ll take me serious and I’m already in my seventh year. If I just stick it out till graduation, I can move away and start over or whatever, right? That stupid fight is making me overthink everything,” he scoffed, a little angry with himself.

Prosper interpreted his answer as something that might have been a bit different to the way that Léon had meant it. Cosimo, some of the guys on the team, the girls when they could stand him. That sounded about the same as Prosper’s highschool experience, he thought. He tried to think back to the beginning of his seventh year, tried to remember where he’d been positioned socially and all that. Prosper had been co-captain of the quidditch team, and Diederik had been captain and his best friend. When had he started dating Luci again? It must have been a couple of months into the school term, after she’d come over here - to this house - in the summer, and they’d almost hooked up.

“I get that,” he said, thinking that he’d gotten around socially too, when he’d been seventeen.

“Yeah,” Prosper replied vaguely, wondering about what Léon could possibly be so unsure about. In so many ways, his highschool life seemed to mirror Prosper’s own - he was popular, good-looking, captain on the team. According to his little brother, he had about as much attention from girls as Prosper had had. No girlfriend worth writing home about yet, but that hadn’t happened for Prosper at Léon’s age yet either. And his grades were… fine? Prosper couldn’t remember exactly how his mum had told him Léon had been doing academically, but he knew they weren’t outstanding, or terrible.

“A lot of stuff,” Prosper answered vaguely, not feeling particularly in the mood for dipping into that whole thing right now. “It helped, but I was stupid too. Hurt people.” Montse came to mind. That was awkward.

“That’s true, you can just move to London or something and remake your life… But also, a year is a long time?” he offered, raising his eyebrows a little. It was a long time to pretend, or to hide things, or to avoid making new friends or whatever Léon was talking about. “Hoe ‘bout this,” Prosper said, adjusting his sitting position a bit so that he could turn and face Léon while he was talking. He leaned into the slant of the roof to his left. “Who would you want to be?”

Prosper didn’t elaborate on his own past but Léon wasn’t going to push him, after all, there were many things that Léon would most likely leave out of the conversation because they were things that, if discussed, would only make the feelings of anger and resentment reappear. In the end, he realized that there was a lot about Prosper he didn’t know, and as he began to see that side of him it made it easier for him to relate to. If he had not spent so much time idolizing his brother and seeking for his approval the way he did everyone’s else’s, Léon might have also seen that his older brother had his own demons that he was slowly coming to terms with.

“I don’t think anyone takes me serious enough to get hurt,” he muttered, not taking into account the promises he broke or the girls he might have lead on with words only to turn around days or even hours later and pursue someone else. He didn’t think about the consequences of the games he played or the way he talked about people or to them but only of how it made him feel. Maybe he, too, needed to mend some bridges but he wouldn’t know how to go about it. Léon found it surprisingly difficult to apologize genuinely to anyone as he never really understood what he had done wrong.

“I guess,” he concurred with his brother. A lot could happen in a year but it was the same rhetoric he had told himself the year before to make himself feel better about whatever had brought him down then. Léon brought his knees closer to his body, lying down with his hands behind his head as he stared at the night sky, thinking of a good answer to give his brother. “I don’t know what I want to be,” he admitted after a few months, “But I don’t want to be who I am now. I think I try so hard to get certain people to like me or laugh or to gain their approval and now I have no idea who I am. But I can’t just stop talking to my mates, we’ve been friends forever,” he explained. “So it’s basically keep it up for one more year or fall out with everyone I’m close to just to try to be the person I think I am.”

Prosper watched for a moment as his little brother lay down on the roof, eyes faced skyward. He drank the last mouthful of wine, then pushed himself up and took a few steps to place the empty bottle inside the attic. If they were smashing wine bottles off of the roof, Prosper was sure his father would have something to say about it, and he had the feeling that Léon didn’t need that right now.

“Because hurting people is the goal?” Prosper teased lightly, catching Léon’s quiet words even against the light breeze. He reached up and ran a hand lightly through his curls, then sighed and joined Léon lying down and looking up at the sky.

“Right,” Prosper said, finally feeling like he was getting an understanding of what Léon was saying now that his brother was putting it more explicitly for him. “You have time to work that stuff out, little brother,” he offered reassuringly. “I know it feels like your whole world is in that school right now, but when you finish school, things get so much bigger.” He looked at Léon, then back up at the sky.

“Do you have anyone you’re close to there?” he probed. He’d met Cosimo Marconi a couple of times, and while he’d thought the kid was pretty funny, he also seemed like a bit of a dickhead. Not necessarily a problem of course, but also not the kind of person Prosper would imagine Léon having a conversation like this with. He thought he already knew the answer to his question, but hoped it was the opposite. He felt protective of his baby brother.

“Of course not,” he said, making sure that his tone conveyed that the last thing he wanted was to hurt anyone else. The point was simply that no one took anything he said seriously so regardless of what he said, it simply went in one ear and out the other of most people he interacted with.

“I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he said after several moments. The last six years, his entire life had revolved around the school: making friends, doing well in his academics, maturing as a person. To make matters worse, the dormitory situation didn’t allow for much freedom, you had to be in-character for the majority of the day and the day that you slipped up, abandoned the character you had built up if only momentarily, that slip up would define your entire career as a student. He had seen reasonably popular people become outsiders, treated with disdain after one comment or action that the student body didn’t agree with. The Beauxbatons crowd was particularly unforgiving.

“But how can anyone be a functioning adult after that?” he asked, referring to the experience of living at school for such a long time. “I don’t think I can deal with several more years of this after graduation, it sounds exhausting,” he noted. It would be, he figured, trying so hard to figure himself out because he hadn’t been able to do so at school.

“Well we’re not exactly close, I’m pretty sure she hates my guts but I’ve talked to Gabby about stuff like girls before, I’d do it with Cosimo but well—” he shrugged, “he’d tell me to stop being such a girl or something like that,” he said nonchalantly. It was the way Cosimo was and while Léon didn’t hold it against his best friend, it made it harder for him to want to approach specific topics. “But Gabby is good at listening, even when she hates you,” he joked.

“We’re not,” Prosper answered with a snort. “Trust me, the older you get the more you realise that no one knows what they’re doing.” He half-smiled at himself, reflecting on the fact that, despite his words, he still had these feelings about all of his friends. Diederik and Zara were getting married for Merlin’s sake. “I know it looks like I’m all figured out, but I promise I’m hoping to turn twenty-five and suddenly have all my shit together. I figure I have a couple more years of faking it before I really get this whole adulting thing.” He was mostly joking, but there was some truth in there too. His seventeen year old self had thought he’d be like, famous and taking the world by storm at twenty-one, but instead he was working in a bar and scrapping for auditions.

It was true that his relationship with Ari was pretty solid. It made him feel a lot more grown up – really caring about someone else in that way had the effect of making him a less selfish person. He wondered vaguely what his seventeen year old self would have thought about his future romances… He probably would have thought he’d still be with Luciana. Or Zoé.

Prosper cleared his throat. “Gabby Delacour?” he asked. He’d forgotten she and Léon were in the same year; Adrien had dated Gabby for seven months - practically a lifetime in school years. Sometimes he thought she was the same age as his other younger brother. “Hates your guts, eh? what’d you do?” Prosper nudged Léon’s arm and chuckled to himself. The idea of Léon getting with Gabrielle Delacour crossed his mind and Prosper absentmindedly drew parallels between him and Pierce again. Not that it was the same at all, of course. “That’s good,” he said, tuning back in. “Not the hating part, but – I’m glad you have someone to talk to.”

It was difficult to imagine to no one, especially people like his older brothers or some of the schoolmates he admired had no idea what they were doing. Léon had spent most of his time at school admiring what others accomplished in silence, reminding himself that once he became older the complicated pieces of the puzzle called life would somehow magically fall into the right place and he would go from flighty teenager to establish adult overnight. “Well if you’re faking it, you’re doing a damn good job at it,” Léon offered with a small smile, not really knowing he had the range to pull something like that off. Even if he was no longer at Beauxbatons and was suddenly in a new environment where he had the opportunity to start from scratch, Léon knew that it would simply be a matter of time before he fell into old habits again.

“I always start the year thinking okay Léon, time to get it together, this one’ll be different and then sooner or later, I feel like the whole thing is a mistake and by mid-year I’m back to being same ol’ me again,” he explained, hoping that the way he had described himself made sense to Prosper, as the entire concept rarely made sense to the teenager himself. In a way, it was obvious that he was resisting change because he was afraid of it. However, it was also obvious that his resistance to change was causing him more emotional damage than he was willing to admit.

He nodded in answer to Léon’s question, not being able to help the chuckle that proceeded from his lips at his question. “She thinks I’m full of shit,” he admitted, the tone in his voice coming to terms with the fact that he believed it as well. In essence, Léon was foolish and it was made clearer by the things he said and the silly things he did. “But I like her, she tells me exactly what she thinks, I don’t think she’s able to do that with everyone,” he continued. Léon liked to believe that Gabrielle spoke to him more truthfully because she didn’t feel the need to keep up appearances, he was just Léon after all. “What about you? Who do you talk to when things get difficult?” he asked, not really sure if Prosper felt comfortable talking to his old friends the way he might have done so during school, especially as they got older.

Prosper nodded wisely, but he didn’t really understand. As much as he and Léon seemed so similar on the surface, perhaps there were some bigger, deeper differences there that he hadn’t really seen until this point. “Because you are,” Prosper teased, when Léon told him Gabrielle thought he was full of shit.

“That’s pretty cool then?” he interjected, turning his head to look at his brother. She couldn’t do that with everyone… It certainly sounded like something that could develop into something else. “She single?” he asked jokingly.

“Who do I talk to – now?” Prosper clarified, giving his brother a sidelong glance before returning his eyes to the sky. “Probably Ari,” he answered honestly, a softness in his eyes. She knew him well by now, and they spent so much time together that it just made sense. “Other than her…” he trailed off, thinking about Volker and Diederik and Emil and Caspar and all of the other boys. He loved them all, but he didn’t really talk to them in the same way. They weren’t close in the same way. He used to talk to Zara, but they’d been less close now that they no longer lived together too.

“Mum?” he offered with a bit of a grin, giving Léon a little nudge in the arm with his elbow. He was joking, but he was also not joking. Prosper had always been close with their mum, in a way that Pierce and, he thought, Adrien, definitely weren’t. “Do you talk to her?” he asked curiously, “We used to talk about all kinds of stuff up here,” Prosper said. He’d told his mother about things like the first time he’d had sex, and the complicated feelings he’d had about it, and Marianela, and Luciana, and Zoé. Lots of real talk.

He chuckled in response, Prosper and Gabrielle were not entirely wrong after all. It also didn’t help that he put forth considerable effort in saying what he thought people wanted to hear, no matter how ridiculous, rather than the ordinary truth. “But at least I’m funny,” he offered, though it was more in the sense of people laughing at him rather than laughing with him. “Oh man, even if I got to take a number, which she’d deny me of course, I’d still stand at the very back of the line. You know how many guys have their eyes on Gabrielle? But I think it helps, thinking I don’t stand a chance? We can talk like normal people that way,” he explained with a pause, not sure if his reasoning made sense to his brother but it certainly made sense to him.

Léon didn’t take rejection like some of his schoolmates did, angrily or in denial, in fact, once a girl turned him down a certain amount of times, he simply shrugged it off, convincing himself that friendship was just as good if not better. Not that he easily lost hope but it felt a little easier to talk when he didn’t feel the need to impress the girl with everything he had to say. “You talk to her about other girls too? Like your exes and stuff,” Léon wondered. In his mind, that was the ultimate sign of friendship, a girl being able to talk about other boys and vice versa without the fear of anger or disappointment. He realized that since they were in a relationship, there were things that he probably didn’t feel comfortable discussing with his girlfriend. In Léon’s ideal world, he would have a girlfriend and feel comfortable telling her about other girls he found attractive.

“Mum listens well,” he nodded in agreement, finding it very easy to talk to their mother as well, probably much more than if he were talkng to his father or Pierce and Adrien. “Yeah, sometimes, she never shares secrets, just listens—I trust her judgement,” he added. It had more to do than her just being their mom. He felt confident discussing deep, personal things with her most of the time but this particular thing—he simply hadn’t figured it out yet enough to have a meaningful conversation about it.

“That veela thing,” Prosper said with a bit of a shrug, his shirt bunching a bit underneath him. Fleur had still been in school when he’d first started, and he’d absolutely lost his mind around that girl, even though she’d been years older than him. He didn’t really understand what Léon meant when he talked about talking like normal people. Prosper was flirty by nature, even with his friends. Even with Zara, he was probably more bantery and cute than most boy/girl friend pairs were, and they were both with other people and not at all interested in each other.

But that had rarely stopped him from talking to people, though.

“Yeah, she knows about all my exes,” Prosper answered, though he sounded a little hesitant. She knew, pretty much, about the girls Prosper had been into when he was younger. She knew about Zoé and Luciana, and he’d even told her about people like Maria. She’d met some of the people he’d dated or hooked up with, because he stayed friends with a lot of them, and he hadn’t kept any secrets from her.

Prosper had been curious. He’d had a million questions about any little mention of the couple of dates she’d gone on before they’d gotten together, or any guys she’d been interested in. There were some things he’d mentioned to Ari, like having been in open relationships before, or that one time he’d sort of dated this couple? But she hadn’t asked much about those things, so he hadn’t told her much about them.

“Mum’s good,” he agreed. “She knows about all my exes,” he added with a laugh. Anytime he’d had girl problems – which had been a lot – he’d been up here with a bottle of wine. "I'm glad you two talk though," he added seriously.

Léon agreed. He knew of Gabrielle and Fleur’s veela heritage and though he had always assumed it was an overstatement on the part of those that had claimed to have been influenced by it, Léon knew that for him it had taken him many years to hone in his focus on Gabby rather than her looks. That wasn’t to say that he wasn’t attracted to her, at this point in his academic career he would be hard-pressed to find any boy that said he didn’t find Gabby pretty. “But once you get stuck in her sphere of prettiness it’s hard to see past it,” he said. He was certain there had been at least one instance that Gabrielle had used it to her advantage but he could only imagine how lonely it must have felt to know that connections with others were not always genuine.

“And she didn’t run off? Sounds like a keeper, then,” Léon added with a smirk, surprised that the couple had been able to have such an uninhibited conversation about past relationships and still stayed together. He wanted to think that he’d be capable of the same but he had his doubts and would feel particularly suspicious if the girl he eventually dated had much more experience than he had. At this point in his life, that was starting to sound like everybody but him. But maybe his opinions would change if he ever fell in love. It was obvious that love had changed Prosper, maybe it would change Léon as well.

“I’d tell mum about all of my exes too if I had any,” he chuckled, “but I’ve told her about girls I liked, things I did for them to show them, I haven’t told her about the fight yet—” he hesitated for a moment, still not sure if it was a discussion he wanted to have with his mother, “but she seems busy and I don’t want her worrying about me. It wasn’t really a big deal after all,” he shrugged it off. He was starting to feel better about the whole thing after talking to Prosper about it. He had always had that effect on the younger wizard, somehow made him feel more confident about things he worried about like his future. “Yeah me too, she always knows exactly what to say, but I guess that’s what makes mum’s so great, doesn’t it?”

“Hasn’t she asked about who messed up your pretty face?” Prosper asked, genuinely curious. He couldn’t imagine their father sitting through dinners without asking. Maybe their mum convinced him not to or something. Maybe she was waiting for Léon to come to her. “She does seem preoccupied,” Prosper agreed. He hadn’t had a proper chance to talk to his mum yet, but when he did, he was going to ask her if there was something up. He didn’t know why, but he felt like she’d been a little strange. Maybe he was just overthinking things.

“Not all mums,” Prosper corrected, not really thinking most people’s mothers should be in the same category as theirs, who was far superior. “Ours is good though, we’re lucky.” He pushed himself back up into a sitting position, feeling the wine a bit more now. he dusted his hands off, then rested his forearms on his bent knees. “Gotta make up for dad somehow,” he said, a little quieter, just in case.