[maidstone] magic leaves | barbara (cw: drug use)

(cw: drug use

April 2004
Near midnight

Jari felt like he'd blinked, and another person had disappeared. Killian had been here a minute ago, but something must have drawn him away because the space next to the Hufflepuff on the grass was now very much vacant. He should probably get up, maybe even find some water, but standing felt like the most challenging thing the teenager had ever contemplated doing. Like if he tried it, he'd probably waste away from exhaustion and turn into dust on the night breeze. Jari considered that thought for a second, and the more he thought about turning to dust and floating away, the more he felt it was happening. Goosebumps ran down his arms, sprouting all over his freckled arms, and Jari shivered. He didn't want to float away.

He sucked in a loud breath of air, though it was mostly smoke that clung around the circle of people he'd been sitting with for far longer than he could remember. "Time to do this," He said out loud by mistake, as the filter between his brain and mouth thinned. Jari turned to the side, putting his palms down on the grass, and after some rolling and shifting maneuvers, he was upon his feet again. It wasn't graceful, and the back of his trousers was wet from the cold grass, but hey, he wasn't floating away, so that was good, right? "Yep," Jari answered, though no one had asked a question, and nodded.

Now... which way was the house?

For a first-timer, Jari had done reasonably well taking his turn every time the joint came around to him. He'd coughed until his sides hurt, and his cheeks felt tight from laughing for far too long, but he hadn't thrown up. That being said, the newly minted Stoner had apparently forgotten how to walk because the moment he started moving toward the house, he bumped into another teenager and began to laugh. "Sorry 'bout that,"

@Barbara Gibson

There were too many people inside. She had been told that this would be a small affair – a party – maybe some of the people from her year – and it had gotten wildly out of hand. Barbara was sure she didn’t know half of their names. And who had invited MacTaggert?

And everybody – everybody – was drinking. Even Billie had tried some, and so Barbara had departed the second round of games halfway through (really – she didn’t want to know which of her classmates had skinny-dipped) – and cried on the toilet about what a shameful coward she was. Then she had dried her eyes, washed her face, retied her ponytail, and had a slice of cold pepperoni pizza, which had been disgusting.

In every way, this was the exact opposite of every other party she’d been to. Her parents favoured the type of party thrown by society up-and-comers, or by society transgressors trying to save face: highbrow, dull affairs, where everybody old enough to drink was feigning temperance, and everybody her own age was trapped in a conversation with an elderly witch who wanted to talk about what was Hogwarts like these days. Barbara much preferred that, she was deciding – at least her head would have been pounding less than it was now, after near five hours of constant blaring music and dim lighting.

She went out to get some air.

Barbara had been standing, feeling rather like she ought to have played truth or dare after all, clutching her arms to herself to keep warm, for roughly two seconds before one of the other partygoers collided with her; he was a deal taller than her, and she nearly stumbled down before she regained her footing, and blinked with horror up at Jari Trickett, who looked – there was no other word for it – insane.

Her mind flashed at once to their last divination lesson before the holiday; she had dismissed her own reading of his teacup as too doomsaying to be accurate, had thought that the poor weather must have been leaving its mark on her Inner Eye, but she realised in a single terrified moment that Jari Trickett was probably about to die here. (That was possible, right? How much had he drunk?)

“Goodness,” she said with alarm. Merlin and Morgana, she didn’t know any healing magic at all – she didn’t even know what could possibly have gone wrong. She stretched one hand out as though to stop him from going on, but stopped herself, suddenly a little petrified that his foretold misfortune could rub off on her. He’d been rather cagey telling her what he’d seen in her future. “Are you alright?”

It was ridiculous how easily the word “goodness” had morphed into “Loch Ness” in Jari’s hazy mind, and he blinked quietly at Barbara. She reached out to him but pulled back, and he felt little twinges of something nagging in the back of his mind. Something terrible, something he couldn’t quite remember. “Yeah, are you?” He asked, repeating her question because, honestly, it was easier than crafting sentences of his own right now. And then Loch Ness sounded in his mind again, and Jari was suddenly full of things to say. “But I think we are in England, not Scotland,” he offered with a polite smile. He was helpful, of course.

Slowly Jari began to remember bits of what he had been so worried about during his last divinations lesson. As if his black and white memories were now in vibrant color. Quietly, the wizard wondered if she feared the forests that surrounded this house. And he realized he wouldn’t have blamed her, not with what the tea leaves had said. “Don’t worry, Nessie only hunts after a rainbow and only in the loch. She doesn’t much care for the foliage; that’s common knowledge.” Was it, though?

The teenager coughed a little, turning his head away from Barbara and covering his mouth. His throat was raw from smoke and laughter, but he had no regrets. He’d barely finished coughing before he was continuing; Jari had the worst timing. “Besides, it’s the Headless Bird Man of Hythe you should be worried about,” A headless figure with webbed feet and bat wings that had terrorized the area in the 60s and that Jari (of course) believed was real. There were rumors that an alien had dropped the beast off one fateful night in 1963 and that the village of Sandling near Hythe was never the same. Jari believed that, too.

“Barbara,” he said, his voice dropping as his tone was suddenly far more severe, “There is something you should know….” And then Jari forgot to finish his sentence as he looked past her toward the woods behind the house. His imagination on overdrive, aided by the possibility of hallucinogens laced in the herbs he’d smoked, Jari was sure he saw a pair of red eyes.

We are in England, not Scotland, said Jari, very politely. Barbara furrowed her brow.

“What?” she said, completely at a loss now – was this about her accent? Did he not understand her? Was he already losing lucidity? Now she was positive, positive!, that something had gone very, very wrong. Finally she realised why she had come – she had come because of course all of this had gotten out of hand, and apparently, evidently, she was the one person here to fix it.

(Not that she thought she could fix it; if Jari Trickett was fated to die, there was no avoiding it – the Inner Eye didn’t exist to help people thwart their futures, but to help them prepare for it. Still. If he had to die, she would have preferred him to die comfortably, and not to collapse on the lawn at this wretched party.)

“Jari,” she said tentatively, but he was speaking again. She quickly curtailed anything she might have brought up, such as ‘I think you’re dying’ or ‘Have you been drinking’ or ‘Do you know how much alcohol can kill you?’, and said, now fully nonplussed, “Who is Nessie? Do you mean that sea serpent?”

Again: what?

She had never even heard of the Headless Bird Man of Hythe. She shook her head with vigour, now feeling like she might cry (again.) “Jari,” she said insistently, but he said her name, and again she shut up to let him speak, now that he sounded very serious. Then he stopped, staring with red eyes off into the distance.

On her word. “Yes?” she prompted him.

Jari was usually so much better at conversation. He was both a good listener and not too shabby at communicating his point of view. However, this far under the influence, all those skills seemed to float away like the cloud of smoke above the circle of new friends he’d just left. Instead of hearing Barbara’s questions or noticing that she’d said his name twice now, the Hufflepuff just kept going on. He spoke about Nessie and the Birdman and all the while bobbed his head a little to the music he could hear coming from the house.

It wasn’t until she said ‘yes?’ that Jari felt like he was starting to focus. His lack of attention turned upside down, and suddenly he was ultra-aware of Barbara standing next to him and the imminent peril.

“I saw tea leaves in your something the other day,” he said, licking his lips because it seemed his mouth was perpetually dry now. Jari paused, clearing his throat and blinking. “Wait, nope, that’s not it…” he shook his head before trying again. “I saw something in your tea leaves, I mean. And well, there is no good way to tell you this, but Barbara, I think you might be in some trouble.” It was the most words Jari had managed to string together in a while, but once he’d started, it became all too easy to keep going.

“I think you might die, but not to worry, I'll bet we can fix it,” Ever the Hufflepuff, Jari would try to help her until his very last breath (or hers…)

“What?” said Barbara with alarm – oh she hated it when nobody told her she had something in her teeth – she clapped one hand over her mouth before Jari corrected himself. This was even less comforting. She said, with a slightly manic tone, “My tea leaves?” over his next words – having conversations was so difficult with the party music pounding at the end of the lawn and Jari about to die.

This was all too much. She said, a little shrilly, “We’re all in some trouble, Jari – everybody’s drunk!” and then, as Jari – who seemed unfathomably drunk, drunk enough that she had never seen anybody like that before – kept going, she flapped her hands about herself as though she were shaking water off her fingers – “Oh, no, Jari – there’s been a mistake – you must be thinking about your tea leaves!”

(Was it possible for one’s impending death to influence one’s Inner Eye, like some form of twisted cosmic projection? That seemed possible. She would have to look it up later in her well-loved copy of Omens, Oracles & the Goat – surely that was what was at play.)

Jari looked confused, and Barbara couldn’t fault him for that, as he was drunk and dying. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, enunciating clearly, “You are about to die, Jari. I saw it in your teacup.” The careful enunciation had made the words sound sort of blunt, so she added, “I’m sorry!”

“My tea leaves,” The teenager repeated her question from moments ago, and his head tilted to the side in confusion. Indeed, she must have been mistaken, but between the two of them, Jari felt like Barbara was probably more coherent, so her concern made him concerned. He blinked a few times, slowly and drawn out, and willed himself back to the land of the sober  – it didn’t work. Swallowing was more challenging than it should have been, his dry throat felt rough and scratchy, and Jari wished he remembered to get something to drink sooner. “I’m not going to… die… Barbara,” Though there wasn’t much conviction in his voice, and Jari felt strange all over.

“Is it suddenly like.. real warm? Or?” Jari pulled at the collar of his sweater as his heart began to race. His hands and feet were sweating, but they felt cold while the rest of him had the sensation of being inside a furnace set to full blast. Jari blinked again, moving to lean against the wall as warming sensations rushed over him in waves. Indeed, it must have been the pot, but he was too far gone to realize it now. And way too inexperienced to know what to do about it. “Oh, I don’t feel so great….” He told her as his mind caught up, and he suddenly gave way too much credence to the fortune she’d read in his tea leaves. Instead of understanding he was stoned, dehydrated, and probably about to have an anxiety attack, Jari realized only one thing could possibly be true:

Jari Trickett was going to die tonight.

“Yes,” said Barbara anxiously; now urgently feeling she had to comfort poor Jari, she patted him on the shoulder, as one might pat a dog or a horse – he had an unpleasantly strong smell. Maybe he was ill – that would explain a lot, actually, like his obvious inability to follow the conversation. She had read, somewhere, about a virus that wizards in the Alps had caught from mountain trolls; maybe this was it. Jari seemed to be thinking slowly enough for that, although perhaps that was the alcohol.

In case it was contagious, she let go of his shoulder and wiped her hand on her skirt. “Maybe not,” she said, though not very hopefully. Though of course she did not want Jari Trickett to die, she was fairly sure that, at this point, it was unpreventable.

She watched him closely, though, trying to cross-reference his symptoms with trollsickness. Fever – check – chills – check – she put her hands on her face, her eyes starting to widen with horror. What a dreadful way to go, she thought; some of the oldest graves in the cemetery behind her house listed the cause of death, such as poor old Polymetis Perkins, whose epitaph read ‘devour’d by Manticore in the Craigs, Febr' 28 1768, the 21 Yr of his age.’ He’d come to visit once when she was nine; she had read to him. Maybe, if Jari became a ghost, she could read to him.

No – she couldn’t think about that yet.

Though Barbara had experience with the dead, she had less experience with the dying. Jari looked rather panicked at the prospect. She said kindly, “Don’t be afraid – I’m told it’s very easy.”

Rather dubiously, she waved a hand in front of her nose, and added, just to check, “You haven’t been travelling, this holiday, have you? Or been around trolls?”

“Easy? How is it easy?” Jari asked, pulling on the neck of his shirt even though it didn’t help comfort him in the slightest. Dying couldn’t possibly be easy, he thought. It always seemed like such a dramatic affair in all the comic books, and as high as he was, Jari couldn’t help but imagine what his own scene might look like. Would he shout at the cruelness of the world? Or see a long tunnel of light, perhaps? Merlin, Jari hoped he wouldn’t have a meaningless monologue at the end. “What else have you been told?” He asked in a feeble effort to distract himself from what they were both sure was coming now.

Jari moved away from the few steps that had led him to the porch of the Maidstone house, his eyeballs glued to the tiny crack in one of the stones and realizing that a faulty step might just be what kills him. Then he turned back to Barbara, “No, not really… just been about Lizard, and here, and….” Well, he had gone on a fishing trip with his father, and he’d been pricked by a hook that hadn’t quite healed yet. Without proper explanation, Jari raised his hand to show her the tiniest of cuts on the end of his finger. It looked like nothing more than a parchment cut, and it wasn’t even infected, but suddenly, Jari was sure he’d caught some plague.

As he took another step, Jari moved around Barbara to the small bench on the porch and slumped into it dramatically. “Barbara…” his voice dropped from its usual chipper tone to something far more solemn, “Do you think death rides a broomstick?”

She wasn’t sure; she sort of doubted herself that it would be easy. (If she thought about it, in fact, she didn’t want to think that dying was easy – what did that say about the dead?) “I don’t know,” she said, now starting to feel panicked herself. “You get to choose if you want to be a ghost or not.” She didn’t want to say the words ‘go on’ – it seemed too technical for right now. She wished her hair was down so she could put her hands through it; instead she twisted them into her skirt, clenching them into fists.

But he hadn’t gone travelling – “Wait, you haven’t been travelling?” she said. “Are you planning to soon? I thought there was a boat in your cup – that’s for voyages. Or journeys. Or…” he raised his hands at her, and for a moment she just blinked with surprise before she spotted a positively miniscule wound. “What, is that a doxy bite or something?”

He collapsed, as though he’d fainted, or – no, never mind, he was just sitting down. “What?” she said, daring finally to come closer, though she didn’t sit next to him, never having trusted outdoor furniture. A breeze blew, intensifying the smell – still unpleasant and more earthy, now that she thought about it, but still definitely coming from Jari and not from the woods or the house. “My mum always said he rides a thestral but I suppose he could… Jari, what in Merlin’s name is that smell?”

Jari thought he might like to be a ghost, but he wondered if being a teenager without purpose was considered "unfinished business." Would they let him stick around even if he'd never live up to whatever potential had been taken from him so soon? He wondered who might come to his funeral. Flashes of cousins crying, and his parents and Abby hit him square in the forehead, like a searing pain that cut straight through him. And squeezed his eyes shut as the wonder became too real.

"I wouldn't want to have to choose," he said, more determined than usual, but his tone didn't show any rudeness. His words were more like a plea, as if Barbara had somehow become his gatekeeper (with her obvious wealth of knowledge of the subject).

Holding his hand up to her, Jari shook his head when she asked if he had been traveling again. "Not a trip, exactly. It was only a fishing outing with my father." Nothing they had done a hundred times before - nothing he would ever do again, he grimly realized. "From a hook, that is," Jari explained, feeling like he might bobble over and fall off the bench entirely. His hand back at his side, he gripped the wood of the bench tightly, and it didn't help his balance a bit.

"What?" he asked sharply, his jaw cutting upward to stare at her where she was standing. "Oh, um," What was the smell? He expected it was any number of things at this point: the joint he'd smoked, the wet grass stains on his trousers, the extra spray of cologne he'd nervously applied before the party, adrenaline maybe.

"Is it the stench of death?"

Jari didn’t want to have to choose; Barbara shrugged, now feeling a little impatient with pitying him. “Well, you have to,” she said, though not as unkindly as she’d thought it. Trying to focus her gaze on his hand, brandished a little too close to her nose for comfort, was making her a little dizzy – maybe she was overwhelmed by the magnitude of this, or just by the party in general (it had been an overwhelming night already – the music, the lights, the smells, everybody (everybody!) drinking.

“A fishing hook?” she said, still confused, and now feeling, with much more certainty, a kind of dawning comprehension. She wasn’t sure yet what she was comprehending – just that this was starting to add up. She shook her head.

It did not seem to be that Jari was dying, although – of course – that was always still possible – he just looked sort of miserable, which could be chalked up easily to the fact that Barbara had been telling him he was about to die. Maybe he was reacting unusually to the alcohol – did Barbara really understand, really, how intoxication worked? Maybe that was it.

He caught her off guard again; “No,” she said, sort of horrified, “No, that’s not the stench of death, Merlin’s beard. Jari, how much did you drink?”