(no subject)
This was written for Kitty. Blame her.
Better Than Cheering Charms
The kid had gone mad. Truly mad. Ben knew the kid had had the propensity to go mad, but he'd never thought Bode would have the audacity to actually do so. But apparently, Rookwood pushed everyone over the edge, even people who were already Evil.
He'd been proud of how he'd handled the situation, really. Meadowes would have been absolutely shocked -- if she'd still been around. Don't speak ill of the dead, Ben thought, not adding the common Department punchline of "or they’ll tell Coyne what you said."
But he had handled the situation well. It was almost like laboratory procedure.
Step one: Notice Bode was missing.
Meadowes' disappearance hadn't been noticed until she'd shrieked "VOLDEMORT MURDERED ME, YOU PRATS!" from behind the Veil at them.
Step two: Notice Rookwood was missing. Put two and two together.
Had Ed been around, she would have pointed out that it was more like finding a square root and noting both the negative and positive possible answers.
Step three: Work out where Rookwood was torturing Bode.
Rookwood's capacity for torture would certainly outlast his patience with Bode's fawning hero-worship. Unless the rumors among those who'd been trainees with Bode were true? No, no, impossible. Bode liked girls, and Rookwood liked numbers and knives.
Step four: Arrive at the cave in Hogsmeade, mistranslate the aggressor via linguistic transfiguration, and confuse him enough to untie the victim.
At this point, procedure broke down.
"Crucio!" It was a young voice -- not a boy's voice, but certainly a boy’s attitude. "You killed her you utter bastard sonovabitch and I'm going to kill you more!"
"Bode, leave him alone!" Ben was now rather regretting Amelia's sudden and awful Important Auror Mission; she couldn't even tell him where she was and what she was doing, and it only worried him. Besides which, he just knew he was going to end up bound and gagged on the cave floor just like Rookwood, and then Crucio'd to death by an angry nineteen-year-old. Nonetheless, he felt somehow obligated to save Rookwood from Bode and Bode from himself.
"What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you, you idiot!" Ben was angry now. "Bloody hell, we thought Rookwood had kidnapped you!"
"YOU DIDN'T TELL ME! NO ONE TOLD ME! AND YOU ALL KNEW!"
Ben sighed. "Bode, can you do Obliviate?"
Bode blinked. "...what?"
"Stupefy!" Ben waved his wand at Rookwood. "Poor bastard. You’re going to Obliviate him."
"I'm not! He killed my girlfriend!" Bode had been crying, he realized. His eyes were red -- not from Evil, but from Angst, a different flavor entirely.
"And if you kill him, you'll be just like him," said Ben. "You're going to Obliviate him, we're going to bring him back to the Department, and then you can join the rest of us in plotting his happy, happy demise while we wait for the return of sensible leadership among the Aurors."
"I... well..." Bode sniffled a bit. "But he killed Maddy."
Ben grimaced; the familiar feeling of where the hell is Amelia? She could be dead! found him yet again. "That's what you said, yes. But killing him won't help that. You can't bring the dead back to life." He sighed. "You're really much too young for this, Bode. Here." He conjured a handkerchief from the air, and offered it to the boy.
"I'm not crying," Bode snapped. His voice was scratchy, and he looked as though he wanted to burst into tears.
"Well, at least blow your nose, those things don't last forever."
Bode had started weeping again at that, of course, but after he'd calmed down a bit, Ben got him to Obliviate Rookwood, and they took him to St. Mungo's with a semi-convincing cover story about a work-related accident. It had not, to Bode's great disappointment, ended up involving weather balloons, but despite this faint evidence of good cheer, Ben sensed that attempted murder of one's Department Head was too traumatic to warrant pretending nothing had happened.
"...look, meet me at the Leaky Cauldron at sevenish?" Ben asked. "I can give you more handkerchiefs that way," he added.
"I'm sure I won’t need them," Bode sniffed.
* * *
At seven o'clock, however, in walked Bode. Since the Rookwood torture incident up at the cave near Hogsmeade, the weather had decided to be nasty, so Bode was rather wetter than he'd been before, even with the crying.
"How do you manage to stay dry?" he asked, blinking through drippy glasses.
"Well, I'm guessing I don't Apparate to Flourish & Blotts first," said Ben, eyeing the heavy bag of books Bode had set down on the next chair. "How much of this is that space porn you like so much?" he asked, peering into the bag.
"Gerroff, it's mine, and I don't read porn." Bode gave him a speccy death glare, and tied the bag shut.
There was a short but highly uncomfortable silence, and then Ben cleared his throat. "...so. Er. Are you feeling any better? About the... Rookwood killing your girlfriend thing?"
Bode winced. "...he. Well. I. She wasn't my girlfriend. She was my ex-girlfriend."
What, is this a Monty Python skit? "I see." He wondered if this was how the shrink felt, worriedly curious and somewhat lost.
"Maddy McGonagall. I... well, I cheated on her with Ix and, and it just sort of blew up, yeah," he said, "but I loved her, and then she died, and I could have done something about it if I'd been with her in Hogsmeade that day..."
It's more than I can do, he thought, before he could stop himself. And then the where is Amelia why haven't I heard from her wouldn't she at least try to contact me if she wasn't dead thoughts started coming again. He shook his head. "...That’s difficult," he managed.
"How would you know?" Bode sounded angry now. His voice said, How dare you try to help me, how dare you imply that any of my pain could be compared to Earth pain?
Ben took a deep breath, in order to keep from ranting about Amelia and her impossible job and her impossible devotion to it. "I can't really talk about that."
"...are you all right?" Bode was frowning through his glasses now; his non-Earth pain had apparently diminished into a manageable amount temporarily.
"I'm fine. Just... worried." Ben started to stir his soup compulsively.
"People say I worry too much," Bode said. "It's not true, though, I worry about things that matter. Like Death Eaters, and aliens, and things."
Ben nodded glumly.
"...my best friend wants to join the Death Eaters. She says 'cos her father's one, they can’t be bad." Ben imagined he could hear the sound of gritting teeth.
"I will never, never understand women," he told Bode.
"I thought you were a linguist?"
"Bode, for that joke you should be taken out and shot. Unless you were being serious, in which case you should just be sterilized."
"Shot, then," said Bode, after a moment's consideration. "The other would probably hurt more."
Ben stared rather morbidly at a cube of potato, not answering Bode.
"...are you all right? You look really pissed off."
He looked up at Bode with a flat expression. "The potato just insulted my face. As they so often do."
"...really?" Bode was wide-eyed.
He rolled his eyes. "I'm just thinking."
"Agh, I know what you mean," said Bode. "I used to do that all the time and just stare into space and people would say 'What's wrong?' and of course I would say 'I'm just thinking, nothing's wrong,' and then they'd ask again and I'd repeat myself and of course they'd keep nattering on about whatever stupid thing they'd been telling me about before. As if I'd rather hear about their day than, you know, keep thinking about what I was thinking ab--"
"BODE, SHUT UP."
"...oh. Yeah. Sorry." There was a long silence, which Ben used to explore every possibility of what might have gone wrong with Amelia’s mission. "...are you going to eat that, or are you just going to... like, interrogate it?"
Ben looked at him, startled.
"Did something happen to your Auror?"
"I... Bode..."
"She hasn't been around the Ministry for at least a month. And now you're being all depressed -- I mean, more than you usually are, and you're probably the least happy person in the Department. ...but she can't be dead, 'cos you're worried about her. If she was dead, you'd be angry."
"...I don't know. She told me, and then we... yelled..." He stared into his soup.
"She's on a top secret thingy, isn't she?"
There was no way in hell Ben would have told him this sort of thing normally, but Bode was good at guessing, so he nodded.
"And you didn’t want her to go?"
"She said I was too... she said a lot of things." He was guiltily aware of his triumph in handling the Rookwood Situation without Amelia. That proved her wrong. He was perfectly capable of getting along without her.
"Yeah, they do that. Girlfriends, I mean. Dunno about wives."
"She doesn't want to be," he said. "It's only technical. Like Evil."
"Does that mean you get to sleep around like before?"
Ben rolled his eyes. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response." Although lately he'd been sizing up girls. Who could he shag who wouldn't tell everyone? Who might be worth ruining everything with Amelia for? Who would even want him anymore, what with his face? But then it would occur to him that Amelia might be dead, and he already felt wretched enough for having never had the opportunity to make up with her before she'd gone to work and he'd never seen her again.
"Just a question." Bode shrugged.
Ben rubbed his eyes. "God, Bode, I came here trying to cheer you up, not complain about my... whatever."
"Well, I think we're both pretty screwed," said Bode, rather good-naturedly for being Bode. "In a non-literal sense."
"I think the Department does that to people," Ben sighed.
"Naw, just the world. Or the war." Bode paused. "It could be worse."
"How?"
"You could've not stopped me and I could've killed Rookwood and turned into him."
"Sort of like a usurper or something?"
"Maybe not that bad. He ever do anything to you?"
Ben rolled his eyes. "Just a lot of threats. Cut my pay once. How terrible. I'm afraid you've got all the Rookwood tragedy." And he hurt Amelia because of me.
"So which of us is the lesser of two evils?" Bode asked.
"Does it matter? You're supposed to pick the one you haven't tried, or something."
Bode grimaced. "That's only with sex and drugs," he said. "I was sort of hoping the answer would be 'neither,' if so."
"The rumors weren't true, I take it?"
"Eugh, no. Rookwood's old. And. You know. Evil."
"Good thing you have such good taste, Bode," Ben said.
"Not really. There's Ix."
"...just as horrible taste as I do, then," he amended. "...er. Sorry about that, by the way. I was just trying to piss you off."
"Yeah, I noticed." Bode shrugged. "It doesn't really matter anymore, she’s a bitch."
"Agreed." He stared down at his soup, which was not only untouched, but, from the feel of it, cold. "Fuck this, I'm going home," he said, standing. "No. I'm going to find someone to fuck, pretend I never met Amelia, and then go home."
Bode looked down at his tea; he'd been sipping at it all through the conversation and there was very little left. The boy downed it in one gulp, before putting it down and looking anxious. About what, it was hard to say. "Erm."
"What? Oh, I suppose you're going to tell me I shouldn't cheat on her; well, she's been gone for God knows how long and she's going to stay that way and she hates me anyway I'm sure and --"
Very deliberately, Bode stood up, removed his glasses, and placed them carefully on the table. Ben had only time enough to notice the bright blue of his eyes, before Bode pulled him into a kiss.
It was a very strange kiss; it was meant gently, but it wasn't by any means soft. It was also a damn good kiss, for all that Bode put far too much sugar in his tea, and it was with some hesitation that Ben pulled away.
"I gather I'm in the running?" Bode asked, looking serious, but extremely red. He fumbled around for his glasses for a moment before getting them on the right way.
"...Bode. You've got to be joking." Ben simply stared at him. How very surreal.
"I could kiss you again if you like," Bode offered.
"...I meant some random Muggle girl," said Ben.
Bode gave him a speccy sort of glare. "Well, are you going to stand there trying to make up your mind or are you going to leave?"
"...I. Um." Before he'd met Amelia, he'd had the attitude that one ought to try everything once, so long as it was harmless. But... could he seriously be considering Bode? Yes, apparently. "Er... follow me," he said, wondering if he was going to pay for this with the inability to mock Bode nearly as effectively.
* * *
Axian Apparated into the flat; it was vaguely familiar from the night they'd turned him Evil, but it was... well, different. Less lived-in. Croaker had been spending a ridiculous amount of time at work -- he even took his coffee by the Veil lately.
As for himself, Axian didn't know why he'd decided to do this, and he felt a bit, well, lost, but he sort of liked Croaker -- not in a happy way, but in a, well, an odd sort of way, and he'd been a lot nicer than anyone else would've been if they'd caught him torturing his Department Head to death in a cave near Hogsmeade.
But when he looked at Croaker, he felt himself flush again, and cleared his throat. "Um."
"Er." Croaker looked pretty awkward too -- Axian thought he mustn't be like this with girls, or else they must all think he was a bit of a joke.
Deciding he'd better do something before he was blushing too much to think, Axian walked up to Croaker and kissed him again. Croaker reached up and pulled his glasses off, and they clattered to the floor as Axian was pushed into the bedroom. He found himself sitting on the bed, fumbling with Croaker's belt as Croaker tried to press against him. "Nono you can't do that I have to aah ohgod mm but your mmyes belt."
Everything worked out in the end, of course.
Better Than Cheering Charms
The kid had gone mad. Truly mad. Ben knew the kid had had the propensity to go mad, but he'd never thought Bode would have the audacity to actually do so. But apparently, Rookwood pushed everyone over the edge, even people who were already Evil.
He'd been proud of how he'd handled the situation, really. Meadowes would have been absolutely shocked -- if she'd still been around. Don't speak ill of the dead, Ben thought, not adding the common Department punchline of "or they’ll tell Coyne what you said."
But he had handled the situation well. It was almost like laboratory procedure.
Step one: Notice Bode was missing.
Meadowes' disappearance hadn't been noticed until she'd shrieked "VOLDEMORT MURDERED ME, YOU PRATS!" from behind the Veil at them.
Step two: Notice Rookwood was missing. Put two and two together.
Had Ed been around, she would have pointed out that it was more like finding a square root and noting both the negative and positive possible answers.
Step three: Work out where Rookwood was torturing Bode.
Rookwood's capacity for torture would certainly outlast his patience with Bode's fawning hero-worship. Unless the rumors among those who'd been trainees with Bode were true? No, no, impossible. Bode liked girls, and Rookwood liked numbers and knives.
Step four: Arrive at the cave in Hogsmeade, mistranslate the aggressor via linguistic transfiguration, and confuse him enough to untie the victim.
At this point, procedure broke down.
"Crucio!" It was a young voice -- not a boy's voice, but certainly a boy’s attitude. "You killed her you utter bastard sonovabitch and I'm going to kill you more!"
"Bode, leave him alone!" Ben was now rather regretting Amelia's sudden and awful Important Auror Mission; she couldn't even tell him where she was and what she was doing, and it only worried him. Besides which, he just knew he was going to end up bound and gagged on the cave floor just like Rookwood, and then Crucio'd to death by an angry nineteen-year-old. Nonetheless, he felt somehow obligated to save Rookwood from Bode and Bode from himself.
"What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you, you idiot!" Ben was angry now. "Bloody hell, we thought Rookwood had kidnapped you!"
"YOU DIDN'T TELL ME! NO ONE TOLD ME! AND YOU ALL KNEW!"
Ben sighed. "Bode, can you do Obliviate?"
Bode blinked. "...what?"
"Stupefy!" Ben waved his wand at Rookwood. "Poor bastard. You’re going to Obliviate him."
"I'm not! He killed my girlfriend!" Bode had been crying, he realized. His eyes were red -- not from Evil, but from Angst, a different flavor entirely.
"And if you kill him, you'll be just like him," said Ben. "You're going to Obliviate him, we're going to bring him back to the Department, and then you can join the rest of us in plotting his happy, happy demise while we wait for the return of sensible leadership among the Aurors."
"I... well..." Bode sniffled a bit. "But he killed Maddy."
Ben grimaced; the familiar feeling of where the hell is Amelia? She could be dead! found him yet again. "That's what you said, yes. But killing him won't help that. You can't bring the dead back to life." He sighed. "You're really much too young for this, Bode. Here." He conjured a handkerchief from the air, and offered it to the boy.
"I'm not crying," Bode snapped. His voice was scratchy, and he looked as though he wanted to burst into tears.
"Well, at least blow your nose, those things don't last forever."
Bode had started weeping again at that, of course, but after he'd calmed down a bit, Ben got him to Obliviate Rookwood, and they took him to St. Mungo's with a semi-convincing cover story about a work-related accident. It had not, to Bode's great disappointment, ended up involving weather balloons, but despite this faint evidence of good cheer, Ben sensed that attempted murder of one's Department Head was too traumatic to warrant pretending nothing had happened.
"...look, meet me at the Leaky Cauldron at sevenish?" Ben asked. "I can give you more handkerchiefs that way," he added.
"I'm sure I won’t need them," Bode sniffed.
* * *
At seven o'clock, however, in walked Bode. Since the Rookwood torture incident up at the cave near Hogsmeade, the weather had decided to be nasty, so Bode was rather wetter than he'd been before, even with the crying.
"How do you manage to stay dry?" he asked, blinking through drippy glasses.
"Well, I'm guessing I don't Apparate to Flourish & Blotts first," said Ben, eyeing the heavy bag of books Bode had set down on the next chair. "How much of this is that space porn you like so much?" he asked, peering into the bag.
"Gerroff, it's mine, and I don't read porn." Bode gave him a speccy death glare, and tied the bag shut.
There was a short but highly uncomfortable silence, and then Ben cleared his throat. "...so. Er. Are you feeling any better? About the... Rookwood killing your girlfriend thing?"
Bode winced. "...he. Well. I. She wasn't my girlfriend. She was my ex-girlfriend."
What, is this a Monty Python skit? "I see." He wondered if this was how the shrink felt, worriedly curious and somewhat lost.
"Maddy McGonagall. I... well, I cheated on her with Ix and, and it just sort of blew up, yeah," he said, "but I loved her, and then she died, and I could have done something about it if I'd been with her in Hogsmeade that day..."
It's more than I can do, he thought, before he could stop himself. And then the where is Amelia why haven't I heard from her wouldn't she at least try to contact me if she wasn't dead thoughts started coming again. He shook his head. "...That’s difficult," he managed.
"How would you know?" Bode sounded angry now. His voice said, How dare you try to help me, how dare you imply that any of my pain could be compared to Earth pain?
Ben took a deep breath, in order to keep from ranting about Amelia and her impossible job and her impossible devotion to it. "I can't really talk about that."
"...are you all right?" Bode was frowning through his glasses now; his non-Earth pain had apparently diminished into a manageable amount temporarily.
"I'm fine. Just... worried." Ben started to stir his soup compulsively.
"People say I worry too much," Bode said. "It's not true, though, I worry about things that matter. Like Death Eaters, and aliens, and things."
Ben nodded glumly.
"...my best friend wants to join the Death Eaters. She says 'cos her father's one, they can’t be bad." Ben imagined he could hear the sound of gritting teeth.
"I will never, never understand women," he told Bode.
"I thought you were a linguist?"
"Bode, for that joke you should be taken out and shot. Unless you were being serious, in which case you should just be sterilized."
"Shot, then," said Bode, after a moment's consideration. "The other would probably hurt more."
Ben stared rather morbidly at a cube of potato, not answering Bode.
"...are you all right? You look really pissed off."
He looked up at Bode with a flat expression. "The potato just insulted my face. As they so often do."
"...really?" Bode was wide-eyed.
He rolled his eyes. "I'm just thinking."
"Agh, I know what you mean," said Bode. "I used to do that all the time and just stare into space and people would say 'What's wrong?' and of course I would say 'I'm just thinking, nothing's wrong,' and then they'd ask again and I'd repeat myself and of course they'd keep nattering on about whatever stupid thing they'd been telling me about before. As if I'd rather hear about their day than, you know, keep thinking about what I was thinking ab--"
"BODE, SHUT UP."
"...oh. Yeah. Sorry." There was a long silence, which Ben used to explore every possibility of what might have gone wrong with Amelia’s mission. "...are you going to eat that, or are you just going to... like, interrogate it?"
Ben looked at him, startled.
"Did something happen to your Auror?"
"I... Bode..."
"She hasn't been around the Ministry for at least a month. And now you're being all depressed -- I mean, more than you usually are, and you're probably the least happy person in the Department. ...but she can't be dead, 'cos you're worried about her. If she was dead, you'd be angry."
"...I don't know. She told me, and then we... yelled..." He stared into his soup.
"She's on a top secret thingy, isn't she?"
There was no way in hell Ben would have told him this sort of thing normally, but Bode was good at guessing, so he nodded.
"And you didn’t want her to go?"
"She said I was too... she said a lot of things." He was guiltily aware of his triumph in handling the Rookwood Situation without Amelia. That proved her wrong. He was perfectly capable of getting along without her.
"Yeah, they do that. Girlfriends, I mean. Dunno about wives."
"She doesn't want to be," he said. "It's only technical. Like Evil."
"Does that mean you get to sleep around like before?"
Ben rolled his eyes. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response." Although lately he'd been sizing up girls. Who could he shag who wouldn't tell everyone? Who might be worth ruining everything with Amelia for? Who would even want him anymore, what with his face? But then it would occur to him that Amelia might be dead, and he already felt wretched enough for having never had the opportunity to make up with her before she'd gone to work and he'd never seen her again.
"Just a question." Bode shrugged.
Ben rubbed his eyes. "God, Bode, I came here trying to cheer you up, not complain about my... whatever."
"Well, I think we're both pretty screwed," said Bode, rather good-naturedly for being Bode. "In a non-literal sense."
"I think the Department does that to people," Ben sighed.
"Naw, just the world. Or the war." Bode paused. "It could be worse."
"How?"
"You could've not stopped me and I could've killed Rookwood and turned into him."
"Sort of like a usurper or something?"
"Maybe not that bad. He ever do anything to you?"
Ben rolled his eyes. "Just a lot of threats. Cut my pay once. How terrible. I'm afraid you've got all the Rookwood tragedy." And he hurt Amelia because of me.
"So which of us is the lesser of two evils?" Bode asked.
"Does it matter? You're supposed to pick the one you haven't tried, or something."
Bode grimaced. "That's only with sex and drugs," he said. "I was sort of hoping the answer would be 'neither,' if so."
"The rumors weren't true, I take it?"
"Eugh, no. Rookwood's old. And. You know. Evil."
"Good thing you have such good taste, Bode," Ben said.
"Not really. There's Ix."
"...just as horrible taste as I do, then," he amended. "...er. Sorry about that, by the way. I was just trying to piss you off."
"Yeah, I noticed." Bode shrugged. "It doesn't really matter anymore, she’s a bitch."
"Agreed." He stared down at his soup, which was not only untouched, but, from the feel of it, cold. "Fuck this, I'm going home," he said, standing. "No. I'm going to find someone to fuck, pretend I never met Amelia, and then go home."
Bode looked down at his tea; he'd been sipping at it all through the conversation and there was very little left. The boy downed it in one gulp, before putting it down and looking anxious. About what, it was hard to say. "Erm."
"What? Oh, I suppose you're going to tell me I shouldn't cheat on her; well, she's been gone for God knows how long and she's going to stay that way and she hates me anyway I'm sure and --"
Very deliberately, Bode stood up, removed his glasses, and placed them carefully on the table. Ben had only time enough to notice the bright blue of his eyes, before Bode pulled him into a kiss.
It was a very strange kiss; it was meant gently, but it wasn't by any means soft. It was also a damn good kiss, for all that Bode put far too much sugar in his tea, and it was with some hesitation that Ben pulled away.
"I gather I'm in the running?" Bode asked, looking serious, but extremely red. He fumbled around for his glasses for a moment before getting them on the right way.
"...Bode. You've got to be joking." Ben simply stared at him. How very surreal.
"I could kiss you again if you like," Bode offered.
"...I meant some random Muggle girl," said Ben.
Bode gave him a speccy sort of glare. "Well, are you going to stand there trying to make up your mind or are you going to leave?"
"...I. Um." Before he'd met Amelia, he'd had the attitude that one ought to try everything once, so long as it was harmless. But... could he seriously be considering Bode? Yes, apparently. "Er... follow me," he said, wondering if he was going to pay for this with the inability to mock Bode nearly as effectively.
* * *
Axian Apparated into the flat; it was vaguely familiar from the night they'd turned him Evil, but it was... well, different. Less lived-in. Croaker had been spending a ridiculous amount of time at work -- he even took his coffee by the Veil lately.
As for himself, Axian didn't know why he'd decided to do this, and he felt a bit, well, lost, but he sort of liked Croaker -- not in a happy way, but in a, well, an odd sort of way, and he'd been a lot nicer than anyone else would've been if they'd caught him torturing his Department Head to death in a cave near Hogsmeade.
But when he looked at Croaker, he felt himself flush again, and cleared his throat. "Um."
"Er." Croaker looked pretty awkward too -- Axian thought he mustn't be like this with girls, or else they must all think he was a bit of a joke.
Deciding he'd better do something before he was blushing too much to think, Axian walked up to Croaker and kissed him again. Croaker reached up and pulled his glasses off, and they clattered to the floor as Axian was pushed into the bedroom. He found himself sitting on the bed, fumbling with Croaker's belt as Croaker tried to press against him. "Nono you can't do that I have to aah ohgod mm but your mmyes belt."
Everything worked out in the end, of course.