whitstable | wish away all the in between { d e a n }

“Living room,” Dennis gestured as they walked through. “Kitchen… Bathroom is just over there… Marian,” Dennis gestured to the door on his left. “Doomer Pat…” He turned back to Dean and held up a finger and slowed as they passed Pat’s door. Sure enough, he could make out the sounds of one of Pat’s documentaries through the door. ‘...could, very well, lead to the inevitable destruction of humankind as we know…’ Dennis gave Dean a look that said see? then kept on moving down the hall.

“Me,” he said, opening his door. The room was small and unimpressive, just big enough for a double mattress on the floor, a nightstand and not much else. it was the smallest room in the house, but there wasn’t any mould on his ceiling here, so it was a clear upgrade from his last place as far as Dennis was concerned. A small section of one of his walls was adorned with a collection of photographs and a small plant Dean had given him a couple of months ago sat, looking rather limp, on his nightstand. That was it as far as decorating went.

Dennis didn’t have many things, and the things he did have were kept in a duffle bag by the end of his mattress. It was bigger on the inside. “Um. That’s not normally there,” he said after a beat, moving to tug down the black sheet he’d strung up over his tiny window. It overlooked the back garden. He tossed the sheet on the bed and cracked the window open.

“Just doing some developing,” he added sheepishly, scratching the back of his head. Of course, he’d been developing photos a couple of weeks ago and the sheet hadn’t moved, but Dean didn’t need to know that. Dennis had cleared away a couple of empty bottles and vacuumed his floor – manually – but he’d missed the sheet. Dennis moved past Dean to check the clock in the hallway. “Should be here any minute,” he said over his shoulder. “Uh… want a coffee?”

Dean locked eyes with Dennis as they passed the roommate’s door, and he suppressed a snigger. The vastness of the secret magical world unnerved him personally, but when he heard other conspiracy theories he couldn’t help imagining: God, what if they knew?

He shifted his toolbox from one hand to the other, stretching out his cramped fingers. He’d borrowed them from his parents. They were curious about Dennis, had been since the year he came for Christmas. Dean had awkwardly deflected it all. You still see that boy, then? A shrug. Yeah, Mum. Seamus, on the other hand, he just hadn’t told altogether. It wasn’t worth the skeptical looks.

Dennis’s room was at the end of the hall, dim. and big enough for one bed but certainly not for two. “I reckon we’ll need to get your mattress out of the way,” said Dean as Dennis took down the drape over the window. Developing photographs, apparently. Dean nodded politely. He was never sure what to say about the photography. He was glad Dennis had a hobby—and now a job—and it felt good when he was willing to share it, but… Dean had always been uneasy about how intensely connected it was to Colin. Surely holding onto that would make it harder to let the grief go? Though Dennis had seemed less fragile lately, Dean still spent all the time they spoke waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But it wasn’t as if he were a therapist. Years of feeling more well-adjusted than half his mates made him think he knew what he was talking about, sometimes.

“Sure, thanks,” he said, giving Dennis an earnest grin. They hadn’t lived together for some time now, but Dean didn’t doubt Dennis remembered how he took coffee. They wandered back toward the kitchen. “So how’s things?” asked Dean after ten seconds of silence, unable to control himself. “What’s Luna up to?” There was always good small talk now that they had a mutual friend.

The doorbell rang. Dean poked his head into the entryway, squinting at the frosted glass window in the front door. “I can get it,” he said to Dennis, who was still fiddling with the coffee machine.

Coffee. Right. He nodded.

Dennis still didn’t really like it, but he’d always drank it with Dean – an attempt made by his younger self to seem less, well, young. And he wasn’t about to stop now. So he made his way back out into the kitchen, fetching two matching mugs from where they were hanging from silver hooks underneath a shelf and placing them on the countertop. He started making it the way Dean liked it.

“Things are good,” he said, and it wasn’t even a lie. Not really. Things were… pretty much the same as they had been for the past few months. Which was about as good as it had been for the past few years, aside from the brief period early last year when he and Clem had started seeing each other. “Luna’s good,” he added, mentally congratulating himself on his creative use of adjectives.

“She’s sending me to France next week, actually. Doing a piece on people who have, uh…” He hesitated, his hands suspended for a second, but then remembered that Marian and her boyfriend were out, and there was only Doomer Pat to worry about. He went back to making the coffee. “...left the magical world. For good.” The doorbell cut off his last word and a half. “That’d be great, thanks,” Dennis said glancing up with a dimpled smile.

Dean left and Dennis did his usual self-chastising thing for being awkward as he poured the coffees. Then he went out to the living room, “Oh, it’s all flatpacked,” he said, raising his eyebrows a little. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but the packages looked smaller than he’d thought they’d be. He set the drinks down on the coffee table and went to help Dean with the packages.

“I’m glad,” said Dean politely, noting the disinterest with which Dennis was replying and willing himself not to drag out the small talk any longer. They could be a couple of men and do their construction in silence. Often silence was better with Dennis, Dean realized, no matter how much it made him feel like a failure. He figured too much time being friends with Seamus had done that to him.

But then Dennis gave him actual information, and he replied at once. “Really?” said Dean. “Does that mean muggle-borns leaving, or—y’know?” He stopped himself before calling them “wizards.” He hadn’t yet figured out an easy enough alternative.

The doorbell gave him an easy out, and he gathered the boxes in the living room. Dean took a pair of scissors from a jar on the mantel to open them. “I’ve never actually done this, mind,” he said. Most of his furniture had been  bought used, either shrunken and resized inside as he didn’t have a host of muggle roommates, or heaved up the stairs by himself. But Dean considered himself to have a decent head on his shoulders--surely enough of one to make a box out of wood. “Reckon there’s instructions, though, it can’t be too hard.”

He’d have made a joke about having Doomer Pat obliviated if need be, but after the waitress incident he figured that might not be as funny to Dennis.

“Yeah,” Dennis said, nodding, even as Dean left. He noted the implied binary between muggleborns and everyone else in the magical world and understood it. Slogans like muggleborn wizards are wizards too seemed trite after, like, the whole war and all. And anyone who thought enough time had passed for those kinds of things not to matter anymore was kidding themselves… Or a bigot. He wondered what the people in Edith’s article would think of things like that.

He looked at the flatpacked furniture. Surely it couldn’t be too difficult. “Me neither,” Dennis said, half a dimpled smile appearing for a moment before he sipped his coffe and burned his tongue a little. He put both cups down on the coffee table by the couch before coming over to where Dean was by the boxes. “Yeah,” he said, thinking that it was a bit ridiculous that he was a full twenty years old and didn’t know how to do anything with his hands. He’d never needed to hammer anything, or use, like, a powertool or whatever.

He hovered for a moment, then went to help Dean open the boxes, lifting the wooden beams out of the boxes and laying them on the floor beside the boxes. Dennis collapsed the cardboard boxes and stacked them up by the door to be taken outside later. “Bedroom?” he said, the word half statement and half request as he started moving things into the other room. They worked in silence for a little while, and then Dean went for the instructions and Dennis leaned against his bedroom wall.

“Um, yeah, so the article is about muggleborns,” he said, bringing the non-existent conversation back to the thing he’d mentioned a couple of minutes ago. “Or, I don’t know, I guess they think of themselves as muggles now…” He trailed off, not really sure about it. He hadn’t been given much of a brief – more of a brief overview. He knew immediately why he’d been picked to do it, too. "Seems kinda crazy, wonder if they got rid of their wands," he mused.

Dean brought the last couple beams to Dennis’s bedroom with his coffee mug in the other hand. He sat it carefully near him on the carpet as he got down to open the instructions again. “I hope I haven’t mixed up all the parts,” he said, looking over the pile. Hopefully he’d just have the sense to notice if he was screwing desk legs onto a chair.

He’d been running out of construction-based conversation and was glad to hear more about Dennis’s article instead. I guess they think of themselves as muggles now. “Do they really?” asked Dean, with…not surprise exactly, but some sense of confusion. Even if he gave up his wand and never did magic for the rest of his life, he still couldn’t imagine considering himself as anything but a wizard. It wouldn’t have ever occurred to him he could be anything else.

He remembered being a kid, and though he’d been happy he had always felt a dull ache of non-belonging underneath it. That he wasn’t like everyone else he knew in some way he couldn’t define until his Hogwarts letter had been brought to his door. Dean had just assumed this was the experience of everyone who’d grown up unaware of magic. But were there people who hadn’t felt that? If he’d have felt right as he was and some stranger had come to tell him he was wrong? He might have left as soon as he got the chance.

Dean took a long sip of lukewarm coffee and held it on his tongue, deep in thought.

“You ever thought about doing that?” he asked. He wasn’t sure how Dennis would take the question but it felt right to ask. For all he knew Dennis was fully in the process of withdrawing, moving in here with a bunch of muggles, building his Ikea furniture on the floor with a screwdriver. Dean wouldn’t have even been surprised. But there was more than concern—frankly, these had been the conversations he liked having with Dennis the most. The philosophy of a foot in two worlds. Sometimes they disagreed, of course, but their opinions were both coming from a place of understanding. Just knowing that was almost as satisfying as talking about it at all.

“You remember when I was taking those art classes?” he asked. “With the muggles?” He had tried to make friends with his classmates, to date even. But none of it had ever lasted. “I dunno, not that being muggle-born isn’t hard, but at least you can…talk about it, y’know? The muggle world.” As he’d grown up Dean had found that the world where part of him was stigmatized was easier for him to live in than the world where part of him didn’t exist.

“Think so,” he replied with a bit of a shrug. He didn’t know how the semantics worked – was one even allowed to call themselves a muggle, if they were actually magical? The magical world probably had a definitive answer on that – labels seemed just as, (or more, in some cases) important in that world – but Dennis couldn’t fault anyone who’d left for not thinking of themselves as a wizard. Or for subverting the magical world’s definitive answers on things.

He glanced as Dean asked something more direct. “About leaving?” Dennis repeated, raising his eyebrows, his own question stalling rather than curious or surprised. He glanced down at the pile of things in his room. “I mean, sure, I thought that’s what was happening, you know – after.” Dennis crouched down to examine the plastic bag filled with little nails and other bits. After the dust had settled back then, Dennis had still been a young teen; he hadn’t had much agency. His parents had decided for him.

He opened the plastic bag and fished out a couple of the little tools they’d included in the pack, handing them to Dean, who he was naturally deferring to as the leader of this task. “But no, not really,” he said, answering Dean’s question properly. He’d fought to come back to the magical world, even though there wasn’t exactly a big life waiting for him when he’d gotten back. Now that he was out of school, he felt even more disconnected from it all. But still, it was better than the alternative; in the muggle world he was a twenty-year-old man who’d dropped out of school at ten, more or less, and didn’t know a single soul except parents he hadn’t seen for years now.

“Right,” he said, nodding slowly. Dean in art classes? Felt like a decade ago. He was silent for a moment, reflecting. “I mean, I agree,” he said, realising his pause had been on the longer side. “I just, I don’t know? I’ve never really tried it. Not as an adult, anyway,” he added, frowning slightly. The only time he’d really tried to connect with a muggle had been with Foxglove, and that had been a mess, so maybe Dean was right. He didn’t like to dwell on that whole thing. His older friend had had longer, though, to try to have muggle friends, or lovers or whatever. Dennis had only left school last winter. “Like I live here, but I don’t really know them,” he said, gesturing at his door.

“Oh, yeah,” said Dean, feeling even dumber. He took the little Ikea tool and listened to the simple denial,  wondering if Dennis had purposely decided not to look for wizard roommates or if the thought had even crossed his mind.

“I guess my dad left the wizarding world,” said Dean after a few moments. Al Pryor, his birth dad, the wayward pure-blood son. Dean had shared his discoveries about his parentage with Dennis back at the start, maybe just to encourage him to open up. Like quid pro quo. “But I don’t think that was really the same. Sort of a refugee situation, probably.” Most of what Dean knew about the man was assumption. His mum hadn’t known about the magic; the family he’d met had been cousins and not particularly close ones. “I dunno,” he said. “I’d be interested to know if anyone with wizard parents had decided to give it all up.”

The fact that someone could just quit magic had surprised him ever since he found out what had happened to Hagrid. Dean had always imagined magic as something that could get stopped up in you if you didn’t use it. Like…blue balls, if he were being crude. But maybe that was just the way he’d rationalized that feeling where he felt full of some electric fizzing, unexplained energy with no idea how to let it out. His magic overheating like the back of a telly.

This was probably insane. God… Hogwarts needed biology class.

Getting up on his knees, Dean started arranging bed slats. “You’ve got all the little—thingies, right?” he asked Dennis. He sort of wished he hadn’t started one of these conversations as they were supposed to be doing something. It made him want to sit and think and drink coffee, not screw screws or whatever went in all these holes. But at least they had something to focus on when it got to be too much—and even better, something that made it so obvious when they had.

It took him a little while to wrap his head back around the subject enough. Dennis was telling him how little experience he had trying to get on with Muggles. Dean bit his tongue. “I guess, trying?” he admitted, “That was what I was doing, after.” It was weird to think that he hadn’t felt at home in a world he’d then just put his life on the line to defend. Dennis had been removed from it and stopped living with his parents to return. Dean had just run away. “It was kind of like—” He laughed quietly, embarrassed to remember he’d ever been so romantic and naïve. “That time I thought about living in France. Y’know? When I went expecting something and it just wasn’t…right enough for me.”

He shrugged. “Of course, wizards and Muggles fall in love all the time, so some people must be alright at it.” Dennis had referenced his housemates; Dean chuckled and  jerked his head toward the door. “Maybe you and Pat’ll be best mates by the end of the year.”

“Right,” Dennis said. He sometimes forgot that Dean wasn’t technically a muggleborn, and felt a little silly now for doing so. He shook his head slightly, the movement near imperceptible. “Nearly impossible, right?” He wanted to add to that sentence. Something like it’s fucking magic came to mind, but they weren’t quite in a place where he felt like he could speak so freely.

Dennis remembered a conversation they’d had on a similar topic ages ago. He’d felt more bitter then, and had talked about feeling tricked by the glamour of it all – drawn into a world that was almost impossible to leave, without being told about the darker side of things. Blood purists. Wars. Death. Dennis shook his head again, but this time it was more at himself than anything he was mulling over. Wordlessly, he passed Dean the small plastic bag of little thingies he’d asked about.

He nodded at the mention of Paris, and was surprised when he felt a little jealous. Paris was a city for artists and lovers, though, and far more of Dean’s sort of thing than his. Dennis wasn’t really interested in moving to France; more likely, he was just jealous of Dean for being who he was (cool, romantic, sure of himself) than jealous of him taking a trip to France. He looked up when his friend talked about his expectations and a sense of it not feeling right, and wondered what feeling "right" would feel like, exactly. Dennis had been an adult for years now, but he couldn't quite shake that adolescent sort of admiration he'd always had for his older friend.

“That’s true,” he said. He supposed those people were usually not teenagers, and they usually didn’t use magic to steal expensive muggle stuff on the first night they met their muggle lovers, though. He half-smiled at the mention of Doomer Pat again. “Could you hold this for a sec?” He asked, passing Dean one end of one of the beams. He moved to the other end so he could attach a couple of pieces together for the bedhead.

“Marian had a birthday party a few weeks ago, actually, and her sister kissed me,” he said, saying it all at once because it felt a little awkward to break up into a proper story. “Well, kind of. I didn’t really… She was pretty out of it.” He shrugged, trying to express that he wasn’t really interested in kissing strangers in general (let alone ones who’d made the rookie mistake of eating extra edibles when the first ones didn’t kick in straight away) without having to put it into words.

“It wasn’t anything,” he added, looking up, then back down at the thing he was screwing into place, making sure it was even. “kind of nice though.” To feel wanted he finished internally. Again, it felt a bit sappy for an afternoon of putting together furniture.

Dennis sounded skeptical. “I dunno,” said Dean. “As a society, we’ve got some shit to work out. I don’t figure you need to come from another one to realize that.” He shrugged weakly. “Not that Muggles also don’t, of course.”

Were there wizards who idealized the muggle world the way some of them idealized the wizarding one? An idyllic society leaps and bounds ahead of their own, free of all the prejudices and pains they’d grown up steeped in? Dean knew that had exhilarated him a little bit when he was young. Maybe it was just a matter of pros and cons. Picking which inequalities you were willing to live with.

He looked down at the bedframe and sighed plaintively. Dean loved having someone to mull his philosophy over with, that was true. But Christ. It was always such a fucking downer.

Dennis waited until he had something in his hands to start his story, which Dean wished he’d have done. “Oh?” he replied with a little smirk. But this wasn’t the kind of kiss that called for smirking, apparently, it wasn’t anything. But kind of nice? Dean wasn’t sure if he got what Dennis was getting at, not well enough to offer advice. But he thought he might get it a little. “Sounds like she might be a better best mate than Pat,” he said. “You never know.”

Don’t close yourself off, he wanted to say. But he didn’t think Dennis would take kindly to hearing it, and he felt stupid even thinking it, so he went back to work on the bed.

[out]

“That’s true,” Dennis said. He still couldn’t imagine it, though. Maybe that was some internalised muggle prejudice or something he thought, mildly amused by the concept; he just couldn’t imagine finding anything in the muggle world compelling enough to leave the magical one for good. The internet, maybe? Computers? He grimaced thinking about writing out essays by hand at school. Still beat hanging out laundry though, and drying spells were just a tiny fraction of how magic fit into his life.

Dennis clicked one of the beams into place against the bedhead. It was all coming up to be a bit simpler than he’d thought it would be. If they finished too quickly, what would they do? Drink coffee and see what was on the telly? Maybe Dennis could take Dean to the docks or something, walk around.

Get a drink, maybe. That was his go-to, but he was a little self conscious drinking with Dean. He didn’t want his older friend to see how badly he paced himself, or how much he drank, but he wasn’t very good at simply having a drink.

“Yeah,” Dennis said with a light chuckle. He didn’t think he’d be making friends with Marian’s sister any time soon. It turned out that he wasn’t very good at it, and struggling to connect with people was much more humiliating than struggling to be okay by himself. At least no one had to see the latter aside from him.

He didn’t want to think about that, though, so he picked up the screwdriver from where he’d put it a moment ago and went back to work.


/end