[hampstead] its the most wonderful time(bomb) of the year. [michael]

“No,” Michael said, and sighed – of course Mavis wouldn’t let him evade the question. It was unreasonable to expect of a teenager, and he knew that, and he’d hoped for it anyway. “I don’t really have an answer,” he admitted. “Wish I did, obviously –” he thought that Mavis, of all people, could understand that, what wasn’t curiosity so much as discomfort with ignorance – “but, you know, I don’t know everything.”

Maybe wasn’t an answer, either. A couple of times was a little better, but still fairly useless to him – “May be worth just trying again,” he suggested, wary that she wouldn’t like that suggestion. He just couldn’t think of anything better than rinsing and repeating – he’d done that before – or giving up entirely – he didn’t want to suggest that. He sat up straighter, twisted his arm further behind him, but the straw was poking too awkwardly where he couldn’t reach, and anyway he didn’t want to look stupid now, so he wrapped his arms over his knees and tried to still himself completely.

He had not quite succeeded by the time Mavis jumped up to her feet – cake first, she said, and Michael, who had kind of hoped he would be left alone to get at the cake (not the cake), said reluctantly, “Alright, alright, alright. So long as you don’t tell your mother.”

He poked his head out of the chicken coop first, craned his neck to check for any of their relatives (he had almost a foot of extra height and a paranoid personality, and consequently thought himself better suited as a lookout) then headed out. Without his jumper it was chilly – he tugged absently at one of his shirtsleeves and followed Mavis inside.

The whisky was in the cupboard; he poured himself a generous portion and had half of it in one go, waved one hand in what he meant as a request to sit down, and what looked more properly like he was being waylaid by a menacing housefly. “Well, you know, met at the Yule Ball, hit it off, joined Harry Potter’s little army club together, hexed each other a bunch, near got expelled, then Gryffindor crushed Ravenclaw in the last match of the year with half its team benched, and I was apparently a sore loser.”

” I don’t know everything.” Michael had said, and Mavis gave him a dramatic gesture, her hands going up beside her as her head tilted back. “Well now you tell me,” She said, but it wasn’t long before she was looking at her brother again and smiling. He didn’t know everything, Mavis knew that, but she also liked to think he knew a helluva lot more than she did. When her mum told her about ‘her time at Hogwarts, Mavis rolled her eyes, refusing to listen or learn, but when Michael spoke, she held on to every word as if it were gossip. Something about the novelty of a cool older brother, or a rebellious teenage witch, she paid more attention to his words either way.

“Yeah, I suppose,” Of course, Mavis knew that Michael was right. The only way she’d ever fly again is if she got off her bum and tried. There was no progress to be made from the ground. It was simple physics. She couldn’t fly if she didn’t try. Only, math did not fix this problem. Her fear had taken hold, and she couldn’t see past it yet. One day, perhaps, but that day was not today. They got up to head back inside, and Mavis rolled her eyes. “I’m not Esther,” She added and then followed Michael out of the coop. Of the three of them, Esther was probably most likely to narc, but it was not like Mavis didn’t still share secrets with her big sister.

Mavis watched as Michael poured a glass of something, and her curiosity left her staring at the brown liquid a little too long. She’d considered trying it before, but she knew she’d be caught if she did. Taking a seat, Mavis pulled her legs up onto the chair and folded them. She tugged her dress, making sure it was over her knees and tried to ignore the runs in her stockings. She nodded along at the stream of information Michael offered her, and Mavis wondered if he was saying it all at once to speed up the conversation.

She would not be so easily defeated.

“So, wait, did you ask her to dance or just like hang out by the wall till she said something to you?” Mavis clarified because she knew one day there would be a ball at Hogwarts, and she would need to know the protocols if a boy did not ask her. She would not mind going with her girlfriends, she was all about girl power, but she also wanted to dance with a cute boy. “What sort of spells did you use?” She followed up again, trying to remember all of the points he had hit so she could ask about each one, but missing some things. “Has Ravenclaw ever won the cup?” Mavis said before she’d realized it and then covered her mouth as her eyes grew wide. “Sorry….” She added from behind her fingers. The Gryffindor did her very best to keep her smile hidden.

Mavis threw her hands up as though it were a deep, personal affront that he didn’t know anything, and Michael snorted out a laugh, less because it had been funny and more because he was feeling distinctly unsure how to behave.

The kitchen was empty and dimly lit, so Michael pointed his wand to light a few of the lamps before he sat down opposite his sister and took a much more moderate sip. She was looking at him with rapt attention, or possibly at his drink, so he kept his hand on it as he spoke, one twitchy finger betraying his restlessness. Their mother hadn’t forbidden him to talk about this, because it’d never been a concern before now, but she’d never liked him to talk about serious things with the girls; he thought she took it as a personal betrayal that they didn’t want her sheltering them. Whatever it was, he didn’t want his mother coming in on this.

They sat in silence for a moment when he was done, before Mavis put together her response, which responded to more of his tale than he’d expected it to. “I asked her out,” he said, and before she could ask him how, “but, no, I don’t remember what I said.” Spells didn’t seem relevant at all; he said, “I dunno, whatever you’re learning in Defense Against the Dark Arts, I reckon,” and finally, “I think in like… the eighties, maybe.” He waited for a moment, in case she had any other questions, then added, with an air of conclusion, “We didn’t speak to each other again for like a year afterward.”

That couldn’t possibly be all the information that Mavis wanted from him, but he wanted her to ask him directly if she wanted to hear it; he thought that was fair. He was even going to answer her as much as he could – none of the evasiveness their mother had gotten the few times she’d pried – so after a moment, he said, “I’ll tell you anything else you want to know. Within reason.”

"For a year? Really?" The first question Mavis asked after Michael gave her free reign had nothing to do with the war, his juvenile delinquency, or following trauma but instead everything to do with Ginny Weasley and the dance. Mavis knew the other stuff was important, and of course she was interested in that too, but as a teenage witch who was sheltered from the war, her priorities were a bit skewed. "Why not? Sounds a bit dodgy, Michael?" Mavis had yet to have her first relationship, date, or kiss, so naturally, she had everything figured out and had no reservations about judging her brother's motivations so many years ago.

Thinking about Michael and Ginny not talking for a year sent Mavis on a spiral through her memories, and the little trip didn't turn out as well as she thought. Initially, the young witch thought there was no way she'd go from dating someone to not talking to them for a whole year. It sounded bonkers, and then she remembered she'd done nearly the same thing with Jae by accident. Leaning against the back of the dining chair she'd sat down in; Mavis tilted until the front to legs were barely off the floor, just enough to see out the window.

There were too many trees between here and there, but Mavis knew that Jae's grandmother's house was in that direction. Just past the grove on the next street over. If she was running, she could get there in two and half minutes; they had counted once. Growing up, Jae and Mae had been the best of friends. They spent nearly all of their time together, but Jae was a muggle and Mavis a witch. As she grew closer to eleven, Mavis had started to realize one day she'd leave Hampstead for Hogwarts and probably never see Jae again. It was devastating, and she could never really explain why to him. And then, in a sick twist of fate, Jae joined her at Hogwarts, and all of the lies Mavis had told him over the years came falling around her.

In the blink of an eye, Jae went from being her best friend to the boy she'd tell her magical friends about and then to the muggle-born wizard that hated her guts. And now, they barely spoke despite having classes together and some friends in common. So, in the end, Mavis supposed she couldn't judge her brother for not talking to Ginny for a whole year. She didn't know the details yet, but she imagined it was something that made the silence worth it. Looking away from the window and back to Michael, Mavis was quieter as she asked another question, "But you became friends again after, though, right?"

Predictably, Mavis prodded: why not? Michael shrugged – “I dunno,” he said. “We didn’t really have friends in common. We were in different houses and years. You know.” Mavis was really nobody to talk, since most of the friends Michael had met over the years had been her age and her house – at least she had more of them than Michael did (he had two) but the fact remained that Hogwarts students self-segregated. It was a natural consequence of Sorting.

Maybe he and Ginny had had the potential to be amicable exes, but Michael, who’d never had an amicable ex, couldn’t even imagine how that would have happened. In the first year after their breakup, he’d been too sore about being called a sore loser (and he did see the hypocrisy in it, but didn’t care) and too eager to side with Cho, who hadn’t been Harry Potter’s (or any of his friends’) biggest fans following the collapse of the D.A.

Even that could have been overcome, though, if not for the D.A.’s revival, where Ginny’s charming stubbornness and grit and strength of character (and all the other things he’d extolled after hours in the Ravenclaw boys’ dormitory until his friends were sick of him) had become liabilities. He’d spent the year doubting her, and making sure she knew it, and by the time it had all come down around them, she was in hiding and he was the Carrows’ newest whipping boy, and he had never felt up to making things right. At least not yet.

His sister had tilted her chair back; Michael followed her gaze out the window into the woods, so that the tilt of the chair wouldn’t make him nervous. Mavis said, you became friends again after, though, right? and Michael grimaced. “We started talking again,” he said. “But no, not really. You know, I almost didn’t go to her wedding, Cordelia had to talk me into it.”

As much as Mavis prayed Michael would give her some fairy tale ending to the story of his relationship with Ginny Weasley, she knew that wasn't how the real world worked. She wished to hear they were all good friends now, that things were comfortable, and it was like all the awful times had never happened, but when he gave her the truth, she didn't frown. Mavis wasn't a grown-up yet, and she was far from mature, but there were little pieces of her that were starting to understand. "I see," she commented as she sat forward in her seat. The little girl that believed everything would work out faded more and more each day, and even though her eye-opening experiences were far less harrowing than Michael's, it didn't make them less important.

"I suppose it would be tough to reconnect, after everything," Mavis attempted a comforting half-smile, but it felt like a lousy thing to say, and the young witch looked away from her brother. She probably could have asked him seven million more questions about his former relationship with Ginny and then followed up with even more questions about his current one with Cordelia, but Mavis was quiet instead. She was still curious about those things, but the more she thought about it, the more she was curious to ask the question she knew she wasn't supposed to ask. What happened to you?, the question was on the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back. Michael had said he'd answer any of her questions — within reason — but being reasonable typically wasn't one of Mavis's strengths.

Mavis had thought about it a lot when he'd first come back home, and even though her life at Hogwarts had distracted her for a while, the Gryffindor couldn't help but still wonder from time to time. She had heard secondhand stories from classmates with older siblings, and she'd read some of what was printed recently in history books, but Mavis was smart enough to know the books never told the whole story. Sitting across from him suddenly felt too close, and Mavis pushed her chair back slowly. Different versions of the same question rolled around in the back of her mind as she went to the counter that housed the cake. "You want some of this?" She asked, grabbing the delicate dessert plates that had been set out on display just so next to the matching cake stand.

As she cut into the cake, careful not to get herself too big a piece and hear about it later from their mum, Mavis's question finally came out. "What happened to you, Michael, during the war, I mean?" While Mavis understood that it was a huge question to ask and that she wasn't specific enough, she couldn't bring herself to ask in better detail. She wasn't asking specifically about the Battle of Hogwarts but rather the years leading up to it. Everything. To the young witch, "the war" was an abstract concept. Something she'd heard about, read about, but not lived through, although it happened during her lifetime. Mavis hadn't been at Hogwarts when The Boy Who Lived returned, nor had she known the wizard who died during the Tri-Wizard tournament. She'd never had to learn how to torture her friends or hide from professors who she was supposed to be able to trust. Mavis had never really lost anyone.

It could be difficult to reconnect after the war, in many ways; that was true – Michael wasn’t ignorant to the shim (he considered it too subtle to be a wedge) that the war had driven between himself and Anthony, the way their friendship had changed when the stakes had gotten high.

That wasn’t always the case, though; he thought that his relationships with the members of the D.A. he had always personally disliked (Ernie Macmillan, Seamus Finnigan, Lavender Brown, to name a few) had honestly benefitted. Perhaps he went out of his way not to speak to them at social functions, but on the rare occasions they crossed paths, he thought there always passed an unspoken acknowledgment between them of what they had undergone together, and he wouldn’t have been dating Cordelia now if it were impossible to get past that.

He said, to sum it up, “Aye, I s’pose.”

Mavis turned to the cake; Michael wrinkled his nose and said, “Just a little.” He didn’t care for cake –  invariably it was too cakey for him, and their mum always got the type with too much icing – but he had begged off of talking about this earlier by claiming to want it, so he supposed he had to have some now. (Bugger.)

He sipped his whisky again, and was wiping his mouth on the back of his hand when she spoke again. She didn’t look at him when she did, so he felt at perfect liberty to pull a grotesque face – bugger – and to have another sip. In fairness, he had brought this on himself, and could not be surprised. In fairness, he knew Mavis very well, and she had never been incurious. In fairness, this blew.

“My dad died,” he said, first. “The Death Eaters put more Death Eaters in charge of the school. It was shit. Tony and I fought a lot, I think we were just… y’know, we didn’t know what we were supposed to do. We were seventeen.” God help him, he hoped Mavis didn’t think that was like, the height of maturity or something. “There was an incident – got pretty badly hurt – they made everybody watch.”

This was the worst of it, at least. He cast about for something less dramatic to say. “I got knocked out like, twenty minutes into the battle, didn’t even get to watch Harry Potter make that speech.” He’d had to hear it secondhand from his friends.

Mavis wasn’t sure where she’d gotten the nerve to ask such a loaded question, but once she had, the young witch tried to be as quiet as possible. Her efforts were fruitless, though, because despite trying to be small and leave Michael room to answer, every movement Mavis made seemed unimaginably noisy. After she’d cut herself far too large a slice of cake, she dropped it unceremoniously on fancy China, and the knife clinked against the porcelain loudly. Mavis cut another piece for Michael, and it was decently sized, but compared to hers, it looked like nothing more than a sliver. The knife fell off the edge of the counter when she set it down, rattling on the floor. “Blast-ended skrewts,” She half cursed, half-whispered, and picked it up as quickly as she could.

Mouthing a brief “sorry” toward Michael, Mavis picked up their plates and returned to the table. The curious witch knew herself all too well and used a forkful of cake to keep herself from interrupting him further, but it didn’t work.

“They made everybody watch?” The blob of half-chewed cake rolled around her mouth as she asked and then made an apologetic face again. Mavis couldn’t imagine what that must have been like for him, and she didn’t want to.  “Probably better that way, innit….” The end of his story had been anticlimactic, and no one was more surprised by the relief Mavis felt from hearing he hadn’t indeed been a part of the battle. Walking the tightrope between being a child and growing up, Mavis struggled to understand her feelings on the subject. Simultaneously, her nosiness demanded more details, but sympathetically she hoped Michael wouldn’t provide any.

 â€œCake's a bit dry, yeah?” she said quietly, having far less to contribute to the conversation now that it was properly her turn to talk.

He regretted letting her ask – not because he was having to answer, but because Mavis was clearly getting in her head about having asked. Michael doubted he’d ever seen his sister make such an actual effort to be quiet – it was impressive more because Mavis was habitually loud than because it was at all successful. He was surprised his mum and Ray hadn’t come wandering in; probably they were still trying to let Mavis cool down.

Not everybody, he supposed he could reassure her – he had been told afterward that a lot of people had shut their eyes or looked away or wept or what have you – but this seemed like an even more dramatic thing to say, so he just shrugged, as if in apology that he’d had to inform her of something so unpleasant. “Wasn’t nice,” he said, and left it at that.

She seemed almost relieved that he’d been knocked out of the battle; in many ways Michael knew it had been lucky – he didn’t doubt that he could have died in about a thousand different and terrible ways if he hadn’t been so quickly incapacitated – but in many other ways, it had been embarrassing. “S’pose so,” he said. He’d lost his wand, and almost lost his leg, but he hadn’t lost his life, as shoddy as it had become afterward.

(The afterward, she might remember – he’d spent weeks only leaving his bedroom to go to the Ministry and talk to lawyers. His mother had been practically desperate to get him out of her house and back at school with his friends; they’d been about the only people he was willing to spend any time with.)

There was a pause before Mavis, very awkwardly, commented on the cake. “Oi,” he said, grateful that she had something else to say (he didn’t; he was thinking about it, and thinking about it had turned into a whole-brain kind of mental activity) – “Don’t let your mum hear you say that about this cake she definitely didn’t buy at the shop.”

Mavis might not have gone through the horrors that Michael had seen, but she was growing closer to understanding what those things might have been. Both from the things he’d told her tonight and what she’d heard from others, and she’d found out enough to know it wasn’t a good time. Michael’s words said about as much, and Mavis nodded again. Wasn’t nice had to be about the best way he could have summed it up, and somehow that pleasantry made Mavis feel like it must have been a hell of a lot worse than he was letting on. She’d heard about students hexing other students, but she could hardly imagine. She pictured Ki or Billie in that situation or any of her friends and squeezed her eyes just to get rid of the image.

For a girl who’d had about a billion questions ten minutes ago, Mavis felt overwhelmed with the snippets she’d received. A part of her half assumed he’d barely answer and wasn’t entirely prepared for the information. She swallowed hard; the dry cake gritted against her throat. And for whatever reason, it seemed wiser to change the subject than to keep prodding for information. Maybe it was because she was scared to learn more or because she was finally growing up enough not to want to cause her brother pain with persistent questioning, but either way, making fun of their mum’s cake seemed a wiser choice.

She crossed her finger over her chest symbolically and tilted in the chair to peak into the hallway connecting to the kitchen. It wouldn’t have been wholly unlike Sandra to be huddled near the doorway, eavesdropping – Mavis had learned from the best, after all. Knowing the coast was clear, Mavis took another bite of the cake; it was a bit stale, but it wasn’t like she would stop eating it or anything.

“So, where is Cordelia?”

Mavis tilted her chair to look through the doorway – Michael assumed she would throw a tantrum if she spotted their mum listening in, so didn’t bother to crane his neck to look also. He had his first bite of cake; it was as unfortunately cakey as he expected it to be.

Then they lapsed back into silence; by now he was regretting bringing up his big scare at all. He tried to work out how he could have told her about his second seventh year of skipping his classes and meals like stones, but without bringing it up; surely the war itself was its own valid excuse. (Besides – he suspected Esther had told Mavis about the state he’d been in that year; she’d done him the favour of keeping it vague with their mother, but Esther’s ability to keep secrets could only stretch so far.)

Again, Mavis changed the topic; again, it was a welcome break from thinking about this – Michael tried to push it out of his mind for good. “She’s at her own family’s Christmas,” he said. “I figured I should spare her our family Christmases for as long as I can, don’t you think?” This was not the first holiday dinner to end this way – in 1997 Michael had picked a huge row with all three of the adults, and then another row with Ray and his mother once his nan had gone home. (In 1998, as a result, he’d skived off of Christmas to get takeout with the Goldsteins.)

(He was thinking about the war again! Fucking hell.)

Easier to think about Cordelia. He added, “She’ll probably come by this week, though, to meet you lot. Don’t harass her too much.” He was meeting her family too; the mutualness of it made the gesture seem rather more monumental than a simple dinner, which he was trying not to think about.