sock and popcorning: Hook leaves town.
They understood one another. Mostly. Fairly well.
Amanda had a glass of something green that stung like scorpions going down. Hook had set aside the scotch and cupped a warm mug of coffee between laced fingers.
They were quiet. Amanda was smoking. Hook could hear the hungry inhalation, the satisfied exhalation, the lull between drags.
"I'm going back, you know."
No answer right away. The sound of her sucking in smoke. The release. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." Ja, mostly unfiltered by an otiose translation charm. "To København."
Papery crush and the grind of ash in the glass tray. "They think you're dead there." She voiced it as -- a mild objection? A flat reminder? Judith could be much the same in her delivery of understatements.
"Or a zombi." Hook's agreement was equally mild, or flat. Both. "It doesn't bother me that much any more. There are weirder things in the Kingdom than a doctor coming back from the dead."
"Like your girlfriend's baby." Maybe that was a reminder too, or maybe Amanda was thinking aloud. She had put away more than one of those green drinks this evening.
"Like Lillebrør," Hook agreed. There was a lot of agreement going on. A lot of assent, a lot of understanding. "If he is still living."
"Which you want to find out?" Lighter-click. She hadn't learnt magic, or didn't care to use a wand, maybe. Every part of a habit could be satisfying, ritualistic. "It's so surprising, to me, that the media doesn't cover a thing like that, on this planet. A monstrous birth."
It was clear she did not mean anything other than the utterance of fact, and Hook accepted this too. Lillebrør was monstrous. The Kingdom considered Hook dead. The sky was blue, except when it might be gray or blurry white or black.
"Who would believe it?" Hook shrugged. "The things that go on in the Kingdom, and underground, underneath it, aren't for respectable press. No one could let themselves believe it, I'm sure. And we who know about Lillebrør wouldn't be the kind to go to tabloids, anyhow. It's enough that we know. And Judith gets along well with most of the staff." Which meant they would not make things worse for her. Which was part of why Hook hadn't been inclined to try going back, himself. A monster baby, son of a demon, was burden enough for poor Judith. The death of her boyfriend would have been bad, but at least mundane. An undead zombi boyfriend, though ... now that would rank with Lillebrør on the scale of unholy intrusions into Judit's once-reasonable life.
"Lucky Judith. Lucky baby." Amanda had not been so lucky, with her own monster child. An ordinary girl who happened to be a genius, and died as a reviled terrorist. Different kind of monster. Hook knew the whole story. She'd told it in bits and pieces, over a succession of lazy evenings. The Ravenclaw bar, the Little Green Apple, other places Hook could show her underground.
"You forget, we're not all world-famous industrialists here. Not everyone has their dirty laundry in the daily news unless they go asking for a press release." It wasn't a reproach. Hook was chuckling lightly, and looking up from his coffee to raise his eyebrows at the woman who'd been Dr. Graystone before her husband made it big and she became effectively Mrs. Graystone Industries.
"Yeah. Another thing I like about this sim. No one knows or cares." She was laughing too.
Hook lost his smile when she called it a sim, though. It was hard to tell sometimes whether Amanda really believed Hogwarts was an outpost of virtual space, or whether she'd accepted Hook's own assurances that this was the planet Earth in the twenty-first century after Christ (and to Amanda, Christ meant nothing anyway). Or something in between. Some compromise that let her stay comfortable and sane. In the end, did it matter? Magic was loopy. As long as Amanda seemed to be on an even keel, Hook let the whole subject alone. She looked fine, tonight. He'd leave it alone again. Probably forever.
Instead he resumed, after the moment of humor had faded: "There's more to my decision, though. You probably can guess that."
Amanda squinted at him, her version of a hard look sans eyeglasses. "I guess I can. It's about the places you showed me. Under the castle."
He wondered if she'd say the word again, sim. She didn't.
"Not all the places," said Hook. "Only a couple."
She nodded. "The place with the mushrooms, that what's his name left here. The place with the snake scratched into the tap. And where Dr. Silvey saw the trilobite."
"What's his name had a name." Hook was smiling a little, though. "Duncan Shriek. You never knew him, that's all. Dr. Silvey you have seen."
"Only because you pointed her out in the bar that time. I never talked to her. If you leave, no one person is going to know all these things, do you realize that?"
"No one person does, not even me. There's an anteater who does." Hook doodled the outline of the huge anteater on a cloth napkin, using a ballpoint pen he'd gotten as a Sorting bribe. "And I think I know where he is, it's just not here for now."
Amanda was still squinting. No, peering at him. It was a hard look, her eyes flinty the way they could be sometimes. "That's why we went to those places, wasn't it? Not because you wanted me to know about it. But because you were hoping to see the anteater thing. And you wanted company."
"I was hoping to introduce you," Hook corrected. The rough shape of the anteater complete, he wrote beneath it in angular capitals the name: ANTUBIS.
"The first time we went into those corridors I thought you were going to do something," Amanda admitted. Her face, pale and prone to freckle or burn, showed color readily, and it was pinking up now, probably from the liquor.
"Yeah? You wanted me to make a move?" He grinned.
"Maybe that, or maybe you would try to rob me. Or kill me. Or take your face off --"
"And reveal my secret identity as the ogre Daniel Graystone, or the ogre Mr. Vergis, or that tattooed Tauron chauffeur who gave you the heebie-jeebies?"
Amanda didn't take this as a joke. "Something like that." Her mouth had thinned into that hard lipless line that meant I refuse to be embarrassed, or at least seemed to mean that now.
With his foot braced against his barstool, Hook swiveled the seat a little, so that his whole body faced Amanda, and he could reach to lay a hand on her shoulder. Lightly.
"Maybe in another universe, I would have made a move," he said, and now he wasn't smiling at all. It was the same face he'd turned to Judith a long time ago, before Lillebrør had come along, before the name of Aage Krüger meant much more than a hint of Rigshospitalet history on yellowed newsprint more than a century old. "We're friends, you and I. Sometimes that means people can be honest with each other. I see a lot in you. Not just because I have a thing for doctors," and there some humor did reach his eyes, a little twinkle, even if he kept his expression solemn; and he thought Amanda might be softening, a little, though that would be like granite softening, her nature being what it was. She was a plastic surgeon, he was a neurosurgeon, and he'd told her before that Judith was another neurosurgeon, a colleague of his. So this was a joke she'd get. "But because I think you might have a degree of -- hm, what could we really call it? Sensitivity to paranormal phenomena? That doesn't sound right to me."
"Says the guy who conducted an exorcism holding a tennis racket to beat the ghosts away," jibed Amanda. Yes, she'd softened a little.
"You understand what I mean."
She must be thinking about her brother, because Hook felt the shiver under his hand. She'd told him about seeing Darius. "It's not a gift, it's called being crazy," she said. She'd told him about that too, before. A nuthouse with the regal name of The Delphi Institute. The years of chasing her dead brother down hallways that were only sometimes real.
"Am I crazy?" His fingers tightened on her shoulder. "Am I a person you would call crazy?"
She glared at him. She bit her lip. He stood his ground, or rather sat. This was important.
"No," she said, finally. "You're the farthest thing from crazy. You play practical jokes on people, but --"
"But I'd never joke about this. Not with you," and that had nothing to do with their months of low-level flirtation, and everything to do with her mental health record and the Hippocratic Oath.
"Fine." She accepted it, but she pulled back, breaking his hold. "Fine, there's something going on in the corridors under the school. What do you want me to do about it? Especially since you care so much about it that you're going to leave with it still going on?"
"There's nothing much going on right now. Maybe not for a long time, maybe never. If some force were active, I think we'd have no doubt about that. You weren't here for the Baby Sun --" And he couldn't remember whether he'd told her about that. "But because Antubis was here, I think it might link up to the Kingdom. Spiritually or even physically, I have no idea yet. I won't know as long as I stay at Hogwarts and only see one side of it. I want to make sure it's not going to become something worse."
"For Hogwarts, or for the Kingdom?" She wasn't cutting him any slack.
"For the places and people I care about." Judith. Mrs. Drusse and her son. Mary, the little ghost girl. "To make sure that whatever link there might be, it doesn't feed the demon I know. In the end, that's what I can do best. Deal with the demon I know, not the demons I don't."
"You're a real hero, Dr. Hook." She turned her face from him and picked up her glass.
He bowed his head, accepting her sarcasm as fair. Was it irony, that Antubis had called him much the same, without any sarcasm at all? Wesleys, white hats, eternal champions, Keepers. You're all the same, and all necessary, the anteater had said. You, slick, are an integral part of what makes reality work the way it should. And he'd spent these years just kicking around Hogwarts, waiting to be needed. He ought to have realized when the Baby Sun came that his own role wasn't to fix things at Hogwarts.
Why hadn't Antubis shown him the way?
But maybe he hadn't wanted to know.
Hook and Amanda Graystone understood one another, mostly, fairly well. It wasn't so uncanny that she was able to break into these silent reflections: "You've probably been planning this for a while. Why is it that you're leaving now? And not before -- or later?"
That, he could answer, even if he didn't want to. "I didn't want to leave. What do they say? I didn't want to face the music. It's not going to be easy, showing up at the Kingdom and saying hej, folks, I'm not dead after all, how've you been and how long in your subjective experience of time have I been in that coffin? Plus, I was able to keep myself busy here. Thought of myself as needed. Snape's an odd duck, not a bad man but not suited to deal with the general public, and the school needed someone in the Hospital Wing who could work around that with some measure of authority. He had Igor, but Igor would be making him sandwiches, and --" Hook stopped. His rationalizations sounded all the flimsier when spoken aloud. "Anyway. Snape's stepped down, just the other day. He told me he was going to do it, and we agreed Igor would be the man to succeed him. I'm not a wizard, and I don't want to be the head of anything here. Igor is friendlier and more open to the general student population than Snape, so the Hospital Wing will be fine without me."
Quiet. He listened to Amanda inhale smoke. Exhale smoke.
"So. I promise. I'm not your husband in disguise," he said, because she wasn't saying anything. "I'm also not his evil business rival, or anyone you knew on Caprica, or anyone very important at all. Just a guy from Denmark, on Earth, who used to have a job at a haunted hospital, and is going back to it, if he can convince his friends he's alive. And, Amanda, I'm sorry to be leaving. I'm certain it's something I have to do. That's all."
"That's not all," said Amanda. "You want me to do your job."
"My job?"
"To keep an eye on the corridors, or keep my psychic senses alert, or whatever. And probably also to volunteer in the Hospital Wing, am I right?"
"That's up to you and Igor, but you know, that isn't a bad idea." Hook refrained from observing that it was Amanda's idea, not something he'd ever hinted she should do. She'd just come up with it herself, just now. "You are a Muggle doctor. Without me, they won't have someone on the Muggle side of medicine in the Wing."
She blew smoke considerately away from him. "We'll see. You'd better go quick."
"Before I can have second thoughts, hm?"
"Before I throw something at you."
He laughed, then, a true and real laugh. "I'm going to miss you, Doctor Graystone."
She stood. "You're damn right you will." Despite all she'd drunk, she could walk away steadily. That she preferred to go barefoot didn't hurt her balance.
He liked to think she was smiling as she left the bar, but he really couldn't be completely certain. Their understanding of one another was not perfect, thankfully. He made the conscious choice to remember her smiling. She, and Snape, and Igor, and all the people he'd known at Hogwarts -- he kept these in his mind as he finished his coffee and mentally prepared himself to leave the school forever.
Then he turned his thoughts to Judith, and (with less pleasure) to his nemesis Dr. Helmer.
Yet at the precise moment he buckled his seatbelt on the Edinburgh runway -- cheapest flight he could find, Edinburgh to Copenhagen, £110 -- it was the face of Antubis the anteater that displaced all other reminiscences for Hook. He remembered Antubis' incongruously carnivorous teeth, which had no place in the mouth of a natural anteater. Those teeth ...
In a certain room of Hogwarts castle, a large kernel of popcorn flashed into existence, and the name of Jørgen 'Hook' Krogshøj etched itself into the popcorn plaque.