FIC: Carrying You Over [NC-17] - Part 1
Author: altri_uccelli
Title: Carrying You Over
Pairing(s): Albus Severus/Scorpius
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: This story is in two (unequal) parts, with a POV change. Possessive!Scorpius; suggestions of dominance. Also: **knotting (temporary penile expansion during intercourse), but not in a bestiality context**
Word Count: 37900
Summary: In San Francisco on an errand for his father, Al Potter runs into his old friend Scorpius Malfoy, who disappeared six years prior. As the two get unwittingly caught up in larger events involving magic both old-world and new, Al wonders if some scars are too deep to heal.
Prompt: Scorpius is a wolf!animagus. (video) [submitted by vaysh11]
Notes: Title is from Patrick Wolf’s The Future, which, along with three other songs from Lupercalia--House, Together, The Days--were lyrically inspirational at various points. Other influences include Emma Bull’s War of the Oaks, from whose queen of the Unseelie Court I borrowed one line; the lady in Elizabeth Pope’s Perilous Gard; Rosemary Sutcliff’s diction; and a lifetime of reading high and urban fantasy. Also contains an homage to Tom Hardy’s eyebrows, shameless appropriation of several folklore traditions, and undoubtedly excessive reference to thinkgeek apparel. Additionally, some Yeats. For the prompter, there is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Wraeththu, several more obvious ones from LOTR, and finally, an encomium to a certain addictive substance commonly purchased in small paper bags. *g*
Carrying You Over
PART I
The thing was, Al thought much later, you didn't expect the turning point of your life to come over a plate of mediocre, at best, spag bol. But at the time he’d just been eating it dutifully in order to avoid seeing the anxious look on his father's face, reminding himself to look up every so often and nod at whatever Neville was saying. It was technical--something about an improvement to the next generation of Veritaserum, given that the Aurors had recently discovered the black-market availability of an antiserum--but Al could follow the advanced aspects with half an ear, unlike his father, for whom Neville was giving an explanation that sidetracked frequently into basic principles. He almost smiled, at the nervousness that Harry still evinced faced with Potions, and at Neville's utter lack of condescension. It had been his kindness at Hogwarts, the escape offered by the greenhouses, that had...
“Sorry, what?” he said.
“I could use you on this, if you're interested,” Neville said, but his carefulness was somehow different from the way everyone else tiptoed around him.
Al shook his head. “Can't. I'm going to the States tomorrow. Errand for dad, but I think I'll stay a bit.”
“Oh?” said Neville, looking between him and Harry.
“He's acting as a courier between the MLE and U.S. law enforcement. One of their regional offices needed some specialized information--old lore, essentially--and some of it was only available in manuscript. Malfoy Manor's library, of course, had the three books. Draco wouldn't allow a copying spell because the books still have residual magic that could be buggered up. Al's going to take them there since shrinking them to post would also have been risky.”
“Fancy that,” said Neville. “I've been working with Draco as well. He heads up Potions and Pharmacology at Mungo's, you know”--he directed that at Al--”and we've both been involved in issues of ingredient purity, importation standards, things of that nature.”
He and Harry launched into a discussion of some proposed legislation on trade sanctions and how they were or were not encouraging illegal importation of restricted ingredients, and Al drifted off again, picking at his dinner, only tuning back in when Neville stood up and said, “I'm off. I've got an early Portkey to Guatemala tomorrow. Al, you have a fantastic time; as tired as I am of traveling at the moment, it's good to get away from here occasionally. Where are you off to, exactly?”
“San Francisco, in northern California.”
“Really!” said Neville. “How odd! That's on my travel agenda next week, but I wonder if I could impose on you to collect the samples.”
“Is this about the ingredient purity work?”
“Yes, Draco and I have been burning the candle at both ends trying to sort it. Draco's at his wits' end, actually. One of his key oncology potions has had a statistically significant failure rate; of course with cancer nothing's ever 100%, so it took awhile to put it together, but he's realized that the tumor cases from the last three months have had atypical results.”
He put on his cloak. “If you like, I could meet you in San Francisco in a few days, on my way back from Tikal. I'll explain then what the sample collection entails. But I think you might find it enjoyable; I would, if I had the time to do it. The Sequoia sempervirens groves are one of the wonders of the natural world. You'll love them, Al.”
After he left, Harry turned to Al with the determined cheerfulness that had started to grate on him. “Maybe you’ll like getting back into herbology work: you were always good at that.”
“Well, I was good at everything, wasn't I. I did everything anyone could have wanted.”
Harry looked as if Al had slapped him. “Is that...is that why you joined? Al, you know I never wanted you to follow in my footsteps, any of you.”
“Not much danger of Jamie doing that.” He regretted the sharpness in his voice immediately. But how could he explain to his father when he didn't understand it himself, the feeling that it had been up to him to...something. With the divorce such a monumental cock-up, and then Jamie...it hadn't even seemed like a choice anymore, entering Auror training.
“Al,” said Harry, stricken. Al had seen him bring an entire room to order with a few brisk words, had seen him take on the International Confederation of Wizards in a towering rage and leave the room with every concession granted, had seen him in court with his face like thunder taking a barrister apart, argument by argument. With his children, though, it was as if every bit of armour were stripped, leaving him exposed and vulnerable.
“Dad,” Al said, his anger trickling away into the suffocating apathy that had become his norm. “Maybe you're right. I'll do some herbology for Neville, make myself useful. That'll be good.” He continued on in that vein until his father stopped looking shattered, and hugged him before heading up to bed, surprised to find a tiny seed of optimism taking root after all.
***
The SFWPD was a good deal grungier than the MLE, but Al rather liked it after the glitz of the International Portkey Terminal. He walked down the corridor, noticing the scuffed tile floor, the heavy oak benches, and the bulletin boards covered with fliers and announcements. There was a smell of slightly burnt coffee, and as he passed doorways he heard snatches of talk that made the place seem cheerful despite its busy intensity.
Led by a secretary who insisted he sit, he found himself in front of the Chief Detective’s imposing, and terribly messy, desk, listening to half of a conversation.
“Jesus fuck, Xiwen, they’d only been back on the street a week! Less!” The man let out a bark of laughter. “Well, pound a cold one for me. And don’t let Rodriguez pull any more douchebag moves like he did with that gang, who was it, the Blackheads. No, the Black Skulls. Whatever, more like numbskulls.” He laughed again at something she said. “Well, they are like zits on the ass cheeks of humanity. Mm hmm, later, babe. Keep me updated.” He disconnected and fixed Al with a bright gaze. “Al Potter,” he said. “It couldn’t be anyone else.” He stoood and reached a hand across his desk, and Al rose to shake it.
“Yeah, I look a lot like my dad.”
“Taller, though, by quite a bit,” he said, squinting at Al in assessment. “He’s a bit of a shrimp. Agile as hell, though, and a rockstar on a broom. You fly?”
“Some. Less since school.”
“Maybe you’ll get some in while you’re here. It’s beautiful up the coast.”
Al nodded politely, wondering when he could sit down. Americans were quite a bit less formal, he’d been told by a number of people; still, it didn’t feel right to do so without any invitation. “I want to thank you for meeting with me, Detective DiMatteo,” he said, in an unconscious effort to get the dynamic on more familiar ground. The other man just looked startled.
“The only person who calls me that is a circuit court judge whose life’s purpose is to make my life hell on earth. So just Paul’s good.”
“No one calls you Paul, either,” called his secretary from the other room.
“She’s right. Pauly. Kid’s nickname I’m still carrying around at age 50.” He gave a comical grimace. “Pauly DiMatteo, bad ass cop; doesn’t exactly make you tremble in your boots, does it?” He sat, finally, and Al did, too.
“Sorry for, um, mispronouncing your name, sir. I thought it was DEmaTAYoh, like the Chaser for Naples.”
“Nah, Dim-MAT-ee-oh. Probably a Jersey thing; we’re all about being so old-country, but real Italians think we’re like a different species. I suppose I should just be grateful those bastards at Ellis Island didn’t Americanize it to Matthews.”
Al had no idea what he was talking about, and it must’ve shown, because Pauly said, “Main point of immigration until the mid-twentieth century. My father’s parents came over from Calabria after the Second World War. Didn’t speak a word of English. They’re in their nineties and still don’t; they go on in this crazy village dialect that probably five people in the world still understand.”
“Were they, um, part of the wizarding world?” asked Al, confused because weren’t language spells in common use decades ago?
“God, no. Muggles, the whole lot of them. It’s my mother who is, sort of; she’s what you Brits call a Squib. But three of my siblings are magic users, and me.” He paused, cocking his head a little. “We don’t have much of that pure-blood crap that you folks get so hot and bothered about. Maybe it’s because almost no one is, or maybe no one is because we don’t give a fuck about it. Hard to say.” He paused, then went on. “But that’s what your dad tried to fix 25 years ago, as I understand it. And did a pretty fair job of it, am I right?”
“It’s still an issue,” Al said, thinking it through as he spoke. “But in the opposite way. People are still suspicious of pure-bloods, especially the ones whose families were involved in the Voldemort Wars. They’re... It’s harder for them.”
Pauly nodded. “Swing of the pendulum. That’s the kind of thing that makes it never ending, though: that cycle of resentment and grievance. In fact...” He looked ready to launch into a topic that Al, for a number of reasons, found interesting, when there was a perfunctory knock on the door, and a voice said, “Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got a meeting in a second and then I have to haul ass across town to the DA.”
Al turned to see a woman wearing knee-length fatigues and flip flops; despite the casual appearance, it was somehow clear that she was in law enforcement. Al caught a glimpse of a tattoo spiralling up the back of her neck, ending in what looked like a few words behind her ear. She dropped the folder she was carrying on the desk, then turned to Al.
“Hi,” she said, holding out her hand, “I’m Liliana Vargas.” The part of her right arm not covered by her t-shirt was a mass of ink, graceful swirls in red, green and blue. Al saw leaf patterns, with vines and some exquisitely shaded flowers.
He raised his eyes, feeling caught out. “Al Potter,” he said. Then, “Sorry, didn’t mean to stare; it’s just...” He looked at it again. “Beautiful.”
“Thanks,” she said, without smiling, just watching him. There was none of the coquettishness that he sometimes--often--got back home, where he’d never known if it was because of how he looked or who his father was. He realized suddenly that he’d have anonymity here; he wouldn’t, except in this office, be ‘Harry Potter’s son, the one who wasn’t a fuckup.’
Liliana launched into quickfire Spanish at Pauly, who mostly listened, nodding. Al eased himself back into his chair, taking the opportunity to look around the office. He let his thoughts wander, still tired from the international Portkey, and came back into alertness when the conversation switched to English.
“Whatever,” Liliana was saying. “I’ve got to go. I’m late, and I don’t want him to disappear on me like he did last time; he just returned, and I want those fresh impressions.” She turned to go, calling out to Al on her way out the door, “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” he said, but she was gone.
“She moves at double speed 95% of the time,” Pauly said. “Outstanding detective, one of my best. She leads my tracker unit.” Al thought he was about to say more when his iPhone rang. “Shit,” he said, looking at the number, “I’ve got to take this. Listen, why don’t you give me the package from your father, and make an appointment with Mary Ellen to come back tomorrow so we can finish up.” Al was aware that Pauly had been charged by Harry to keep an eye on him. Before, he’d been too apathetic to mind. Now, after meeting him, he still didn’t mind, but in a different way. By the time he’d taken the three fragile tomes--one a 15th c. codex in manuscript, the others early printed books--from his satchel and set them on the desk, Pauly was already speaking rapidly into his phone, but he raised a hand, mouthing ‘see you tomorrow’ when Al glanced back from the doorway.
*
Al was back in the corridor 15 minutes later, after a succinct tutorial on using his loaner iPhone.
“I’ve heard you don’t use them in England,” Pauly’s secretary had said in her gravelly voice. She clearly considered this inconceivable. “What do you do to communicate?”
“Well, there’s the Floo, and Firecalling, and there are Owls everywhere and they’re quite fast. The Aurors use charmed mirrors quite a lot, or a Patronus sometimes. I don’t know, we Apparate to talk to people if it’s urgent.”
“I suppose that might work in a smaller country,” she said doubtfully, then handed him the phone. “Well, here it is, and I’ve written down your phone number if you want to give it to...well, I don’t know who, if no one has them in your country.” She looked nonplussed at that all over again, but forged on. “That one’s de-accessioned from the evidence room. Don’t worry, we’ve cleared all the drug lords out of the contacts,” she said, clearly inviting Al to smile; he sensed that it was all true, though. Merlin, what a country. For all its vibrancy and enthusiasm for innovative technology, it seemed unmoored, spinning out of control. Or maybe it seemed more that way because the Muggle and Wizarding worlds here were intertwined to an extent almost unimaginable in England. Al came back to attention, realizing he’d missed part of her explanation. “...and you should get an email address, if you know what that is.”
“I do, actually. My father has to know about the internet for when he works with Muggles, especially ones abroad, so he’s had a laptop for awhile. It doesn’t work that well around magic, though.”
“Well, these do; they’re specially made for magic users. One of Apple’s chief engineers is a witch, a level 7.” Al was scrolling through the apps in fascination and she watched him, amused. “Go along, then. We’ll see you back here at 2:00 tomorrow, and you can come by a little earlier if you’re having any trouble with it.”
Al walked slowly down the corridor, wondering what something called Fruit Ninja could possibly be, when something wriggled its way into his consciousness. It was... He stopped, pocketing the phone absent-mindedly so he could concentrate. It was someone’s magic, and it felt known and yet not; it was maddeningly, tantalizingly familiar, but just beyond the edge of his reach. It... He shook his head, as if that would clear the confusion. He saw two more rooms before the lift, and peered into both; no, just offices, one full of records and clerks who were sending documents flying into their appropriate resting place one by one; the other was a conference room with four people arguing around a table, a 3D map of the city slowly rotating in the air between them. By the time he’d got to the lift, the sense was gone and the strange excitement with it, leaving him tired, and deflated, and wondering why this--the trip, all of it--had seemed like a good idea, as if escape were ever really possible, especially when you were running from yourself.
***
He’d shaken off his mood, however, some hours later, and was whistling as he waited for his toast. He leaned against the counter, examining his hands. He’d not had broom callouses in a while; the tender skin, and the ache in his back, and his chapped lips--it was discomfort that nevertheless felt comfortable, somehow. How had he let it go so long since he’d flown? Really flown, all out, crouched almost parallel to his broom, the wind making his eyes water. He’d gone higher than he had in ages, too, inspired by the sight in the distance of the redwoods. Or maybe by the desire to get above the fog, which had stealthily soaked his cloak before he pulled up and fumbled with his wand. Almost dropped it, in fact; he’d have to get some gloves tomorrow.
He was crunching his fifth piece of toast--the bread here was fantastic, fantastic--and paging through the Redwood Parks Guide he’d found earlier on the kitchen table, when his head jerked up at the sound of a knock. He was the only one staying at the house, for the moment, and no one knew he was here, and... He drew his wand, but before he could even stand he heard the door closing and a voice saying, “Hello? You home? I come bearing...” and by then she was in the doorway, so instead of finishing the sentence she held up the six pack.
“Local brew,” Liliana said, setting it on the counter, then alarming Al by turning an unmistakably evaluative frown on him. “Huh. You looked older this afternoon. Maybe it was the clothes. You know what, though, I don’t care if you’re legal or not, I need a drink.” She went right to the drawer that held the bottle opener, then grabbed two by the neck and took a chair as if it were her regular. “Cheers,” she said, pushing one across the table.
“Do Americans say that?” he asked, following her lead and taking a long swig.
“Americans say whatever the fuck they want,” Liliana answered. She had rings on, now; wide silver ones, mostly, and some matched the studs around the outside of her ears. “Haven’t you got that yet? They take whatever’s good and turn it into their own. Culture vultures.” She leaned her head back and downed half the beer. “Not a criticism, just an observation.”
“Why do you say ‘They take’? They take whatever’s good...”
“Oh, I have to feel like the angry outsider or all’s not right with my world,” she said, and startled Al by smiling brilliantly. It eased the rather hard lines of her face. “Are you getting settled? You looked like a lost soul today at Pauly’s.”
“I’d just Portkeyed in,” he said, sitting up straighter. “It lags you. I was okay after I slept for awhile.”
“And flew to see the redwoods.”
“How’d you know?” He hadn’t intended to do it; it’d been a spur of the moment thing when he’d woken up, disturbed by a dream he couldn’t remember, and just needing to get out of his head by pushing his body.
“One, you have that post-coital look that people get after they’ve seen them for the first time,” she said. “Exhibit two is there.” She pointed to Al’s broom in the corner, twigs still darkened from the wet. “Very nice, by the way. I understand you’re the equivalent of Quidditch royalty over there.”
“Just my mum and my cousin,” he started to mutter before realizing she was teasing.
“And three,” she said, returning to her list, “I thought you’d find them intriguing.” She gestured at the guidebook. “Hard not to, once you see the pictures.”
“You left it for me?” he said. “I’m...uh, thank you.”
She raised her beer to him in a gesture that looked half mocking, but Al was starting to see that that was her default register.
“I didn’t actually plan to go all the way there,” he said, “but I saw them from the air and then I had to land.” He’d followed a tour group around, unable not to when he overheard the guide saying that the tallest living things on the planet, and some of the oldest, were here, in these last scattered parks along the northern California coast, the remnants of a forest that was once two million acres.
“You flew all the way there? Because the book’s got the App coordinates.”
“Flew. It was only 12 miles to Muir Woods, and I wanted to see the coast anyway.”
“Muir’s not the biggest, but it’s at the point that you start thinking a 250 foot tree isn’t tall enough for you that you have to take a step back. That’s American, too; everything’s got to be the biggest or the deepest or the sparkliest or whatever damn thing. And it’s a wizarding fetish, too, you know? The oldest this or the rarest that. So you combine that in American wizards, and you see why I never have to worry about my job security. There’s always going to be crazy people motivated by the extremes.”
“It is true, sometimes,” Al pointed out. “Power is drawn to the extremes.”
“Yes, and that’s why it blows up in their faces half the time. Metaphorically. But literally, once or twice.” She rolled her eyes. “Wizards. I didn’t grow up with ‘em, so excuse what Pauly calls my ‘jaundiced’ view.”
“But...you’re one of us, right? One of them,” he fumbled. “A wizard.” He knew he was blushing.
“I’m a magic user, of sorts,” she said, leaning back in her chair and stretching for another beer. She didn’t open it right away, though, but ran her finger through the condensation. Her head was tilted down, and Al saw three small rings in her eyebrow that he hadn’t noticed before. “Pauly tell you what I do in the department?”
“He said you were a tracker.” His notion of what that entailed was vague.
“Yep. I do a little of the admin stuff now, but I started out purely in the field. Chasing the bad guys, tracking ‘em. And I’m the tracker I am because of the other senses I can call upon. You know what a coyote is?”
“Like a...is it like a fox?”
“It’s a species of canine, related to wolves. Extraordinarily acute sense of smell, a lot of speed and endurance, exceptional hearing...you see how that could come in handy?”
Al looked at her blankly before it clicked. “Oh, so you’re an Animagus,” he said, the tracking suddenly clear.
“No.” Her voice was sharp. “Words have meaning and power that can’t be forced into the space made for them by another language.”
“But...er, you call them something different here? Sorry, I didn’t...” Al found her terrifying. She made him feel like a bumbling puppy, and he should have resented it.
“I’m a skinwalker. Ever heard of that?”
He shook his head.
“Navajo word’s yee naaldlooshii. They’re feared and hated; my grandfather had lots of stories about skinwalkers’ evil deeds. Even more so after everyone found out I was one. It’s not that common, a woman skinwalker. That made it worse. I got blamed for a lot of things that went wrong on the rez.”
“Like what?” Al asked, clearing his throat when the first word came out in a croak. Even knowing the stories of his father’s childhood, it disturbed him, the idea of someone being loathed for what they were, naturally, with no way of being anything else.
“Car accidents. A well gone bad. A kid who started having seizures. Kids born with Down syndrome.” She shrugged and took a long swallow, banging it down when she was done. “But hey! I got out of there. I went to my grandmother’s sister’s for my last two years of high school; she’s Sandia Pueblo. They have the same ideas, but no one there knew I was. Until spring of senior year, but by then I just had to wait it out.”
The difference between an Animagus and a skinwalker was brutally clear. As an uncommon ability, Animagi were respected for the skill and magical strength they represented. Al didn’t even know when there’d last been someone who’d achieved it at school. And even in the Ministry, or the Aurors, he only knew of a few Animagi (though a few others were rumoured, and he’d been a part of more than one drunken conversation speculating on the animal forms various people would take).
“So you...” He hesitated, trying to work out how to articulate it. “You weren’t trying to transform? Because, with an Animagus, it takes a lot of work, and most people can’t do it anyway.”
“I know an Animagus,” she said, “and from what I can tell it’s a completely different kind of magic. But when we’re in our animal forms, it’s the same. Different paths to get there, but we experience our animal the same. He can stay longer in it, though; I get itchy. He...” Liliana took a swig, keeping her eyes on him the whole time; something about her gaze made him tense. “He prefers it. There’s a distance from human crap that you get, emotions and all that. Kind of nice--it got me through high school, that’s for fucking sure--but you can see how it could get out of hand.”
Al nodded.
“That’s why we have alcohol,” she said, brandishing her beer a little. “Get a little buzzed, dull the pain, but you gotta get up and face the shit the next day.” But then suddenly the edgy mood dissipated as she added, “Nothing worse than a hangover and a screaming kid who needs her diaper changed, though. So my wild days are long gone.”
Al was relieved that the conversation moved into lighter paths, and was surprised when, sometime later, he glanced at the clock and saw that two hours had gone by.
“Did we really kill that six? Damn. Don’t tell Pauly I corrupted you like this; he’ll have my head.”
“Why, because he told you to keep an eye on me? I’m not actually a kid, whatever he and my dad think. I don’t need minding.”
“Is that what you think?” Al couldn’t have made even a stab of a guess at what was going on behind her inscrutable face. “That I’m doing this for Pauly?”
Al didn’t bother nodding, because obviously.
She stood up, cracked her back rather ostentatiously, and wiggled her toes into her flip flops. She then gathered the six empties and dropped them in the recycling bin. Al didn’t take his eyes off her.
“Nah,” she threw over her shoulder just before the door clicked shut, “he’s not the one.”
***
Al realized when he stood up how pissed he was, and it wasn’t a feeling he relished. He closed his eyes and concentrated, then cast Sobrietas on himself, which wasn’t a particularly easy spell to do properly, even when one was sober and casting it on someone else. It was something he’d worked hard to achieve, once upon a time, not because he was drunk often, but because it was known to be difficult and--yeah, now he remembered; it had been after sixth year and he’d been doing a Patronus since the fall but had made precisely zero headway on becoming an Animagus. The magic had been beyond him, and that had been galling; it might have been the first thing he’d failed at. Well, that he cared about, at any rate; there were plenty of things that he was just as happy to be pants at, like Divination.
But to be an Animagus: that dream had lit his imagination from the earliest days of listening to his father tell stories about his own father and Sirius Black and Teddy’s father. Of course, Remus Lupin hadn’t actually been one, and that made Al wonder if a skinwalker--if the meaning of a skinwalker--was more like a werewolf than an Animagus. It was hard to imagine a girl’s family shunning her like Liliana’s had; but then, it was strange hearing his father talk about what it had used to be like for werewolves.
Al looked in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, tilting his head up to see his jaw. Not enough to shave, really, which was a bit of a pity because he found it relaxing, the warmth, and the foamy soap that smelled faintly of bergamot, and the slow, careful strokes of the blade. He liked to be clean-shaven, and more than that, he liked boys who were. On their face, and on their chest, and... He could feel himself rising in his boxers, and by the time he’d extinguished all the lights and locked the door, he was fully erect. It had been a week since he’d wanked, maybe longer; it had got to the point, back in those last endless days with the Aurors, that he’d wondered if he’d been hit with an Impotentia hex. But he’d screened negative in their routine weekly checks, so he was forced to conclude that it was yet another way he was failing in his life.
Seeing his dick, hard, was a bit like seeing an old friend you weren’t expecting. He pushed the duvet aside and lay down on his back, grinning a little when his dick popped through the slit in his boxers. “Glad you decided to make an appearance,” he said, taking it in hand and giving it a couple of dry strokes. He reached for the lube with his other hand, and felt a tingle of anticipation as he slicked up his hand. He’d initially got the lube when he’d woken up to the fact that fingering got him off harder than anything, and now he used it on his cock, too, never so glad he wasn’t a Muggle as when he lay there with chest and stomach a mess of semen, lube somehow everywhere, and the sweat drying on his skin. A quick cleaning spell, and he could fall asleep with the pleasure still tingling on his skin.
He wondered if being in the U.S. would return some of his interest in, if not sex, then at least wanking. Just being away from it all--the Aurors, and Britain, and the endless scrutiny on him--had to help. And he associated being here with sexual freedom, ever since his very first encounter, the summer before seventh year. He’d been at the national junior team summer camp, to train for a month-long series of exhibitions against other junior teams. The camp had been meant to provide the teams with experience encountering other styles of play.
He’d been deep in the closet, but it had been an almost painfully clichéd scene: last one in the locker room (or so he thought), then entering the showers only to see one of the U.S. players under the spray, head back and eyes closed, pulling on the most beautiful, thick cock that Al had ever imagined. He could still visualize the boy’s full bottom lip, white where his teeth were digging into it as he trembled, his other hand on his balls moving restlessly. The moment when Al looked up the sleek torso, so much more developed than his, to see the boy watching him--god, that horrifying moment of panic that he’d been disastrously outed--followed by the sheer stupefaction of hearing him say, “Come here”: he really didn’t think he’d ever forget it even though at the time his mind was chaos. He’d gone close, still idiotically trying to hide his own erection behind a towel, but the boy had thrown it to the changing benches, squirted some soap on Al’s hand, and said, “Help me out?” Then he’d closed Al’s fingers around his cock, and done the same to Al’s, and even though the boy had started much closer to orgasm than Al, they both went off at the same time, Al’s triggered by the boy’s nonchalant sensuality and the mind-blowing feel of a hard cock that wasn’t his in his hand.
“Whew,” the boy had breathed out as he squeezed the last feeble squirts onto Al’s belly. “It’s always more awesome with someone else’s hand.” He turned into the shower spray and rubbed at his stomach and hands. “Whew,” he said again. “Thanks.” When Al didn’t say anything, he turned his head and looked inquiring. “You okay? We cool?”
“Uh, yeah,” Al managed, voice husky then squeaking, as it hadn’t done in more than a year. God, he hated puberty.
“Oh, you’re one of the Brits,” he said. “I thought you looked familiar. We scrimmaged you yesterday, right?”
It felt surreal, chatting about their respective teams while their cocks shrunk back to their normal state, but in the end that was what made it something he remembered with bemusement rather than a full-blown freak out. He’d not had another encounter that summer (having no idea how to make one happen), but he went back to school less in denial about his sexuality and more able to wank without guilt over the images in his head. But no one was out at Hogwarts, only the rumor of a fifth-year Hufflepuff who’d allegedly offered to suck another boy off.
It hadn’t been until the following summer, at Finistère after he’d left school but before he started Auror training, that he had his second encounter. He’d begged to be allowed to go to Paris for a few days, alone, and since it was his father there that week, not his mother, he’d hardly had to whinge to get his agreement. He’d gone to a bar in the Marais the first night, terrified and awkward. A few beers later, he was able to answer when a trio of rowdy Aussie travellers asked him something, and they bought him a shot of something fiery, and then a few more, and Al found himself on his knees in the less-than-pristine loo, sucking the head of a cock enthusiastically but apparently with a bit too much tooth. He leaned his cheek against the cool of the metal door, moaning happily at the feel of rough fingers against, then shoving in, his arse. Thinking about it later, he was appalled at his passivity and amazed that he hadn’t lost his virginity with spit for lube. But the man was either too careful or too decent or too cognizant of the fact that Al knew nothing about this, because he merely gave Al the handjob of his life while twisting his fingers in a way that made Al almost black out when he came. He came back to awareness while the man was scrubbing with a handful of loo paper at Al’s back.
He'd gone back the next night. He could see blokes pulling all around him, but felt helpless to make anything happen, and whether that was because he looked as awkward and out of place as he felt, he didn't know. He went back to Finistère and thence to London to start Auror training feeling better, however, and though he thought once or twice about trying a Muggle gay bar, it seemed too overwhelming, not to mention risky.
He'd instead spent the past year experimenting with what got him off, and though he didn't immediately pursue what had been so obvious in the dirty toilet stall of a Paris club, he couldn't avoid it for long. It had been a long time now since he'd wanked without using the fingers of his other hand; in fact, the few days that he'd had his left hand salved and gauzed for a magical burn, its absence had made him itchy and unsatisfied. He liked the feeling of his body closing around two fingers, then three; he liked the tingle of the sensitive nerves around the opening; he couldn't always get the right angle to reach his prostate, but even without it, he had the strongest, most wracking orgasms of his life like this.
He started to pant and grind down on his one hand while snapping up into the slick tightness of his other, and suddenly he wasn't remembering that toilet stall anymore; his mind was back in the hallway of the SFWPD feeling a strange magic, but before he could even wonder at that he was spilling hot over his fist, pumping up in the same rhythm that his body was contracting around his fingers.
He cleaned up and wrapped the bedclothes close, the echoes of his orgasm still rippling through him, sparking occasionally as from a fire that'd been banked for the night.
***
Al woke up early, still lagged, and the sun rose as he went through the guidebook methodically, making a list of the forests he would visit, prioritizing them by percentage of old growth. Not that he actually saw the sunrise; it was more a gradual lightening of fog from charcoal to grey to silver. He dressed in jeans and a jumper since he’d inevitably be around Muggles (though he’d seen few robes in Wizarding areas, either), and was just shrinking the book and a bottle of water when he heard a knock.
“Yo, ‘s me.”
Al unlocked it with his wand and Liliana strolled in. “Didn’t think I’d find you up so early,” she commented.
“Why’d you come by, then?” Al couldn’t help but be amused.
“Prickly conscience,” she said. “I was worried you’d be a little worse for the wear this morning.”
“Oi, come on, it was only 3 beers.”
“Three Belgian tripels with 9.8% alcohol,” Liliana corrected. “Significant difference.”
“I told you before, I’m not actually a child.”
“Yeah, yeah. Ready to go? We’ll Side-Along it.” She took his arm and rolled her eyes. “You’ll see.”
The Apparition felt...well, it didn’t feel like any Side-Along he’d ever done. And now that he’d been made aware of it, he could feel the strangeness in her magic, like it was made of sand and bones and an endless pitiless sun. It throbbed around him, her magic did, and he knew he must look as discombobulated as he felt. She was either tactful or unobservant, however, because though she kept hold of his arm, she said easily, “Here we are, the best cafe in Berkeley, and the best muffins in the Bay Area.”
He looked at the shop window, for something to focus on. ‘Sheela na Gig,’ he read. “It’s, er, Irish?”
“Not really,” she said, applying a gradually-dissipating Finite to the Disillusionment, and herding him inside. “Single? Double? Capp? I’m buying.”
“Er, latte,” said Al, who rather desperately wanted tea but knew the chances of getting a decent cup were negligible. He waited for Liliana next to what was obviously a community bulletin board, with notices about yoga, reflexology, baby massage, a playgroup cooperative (“no toy weapons, organic snacks only please”), a queer film festival, an EnvironmentFirst protest, and countless other things of that nature. He turned when his nose was assailed by a delicious smell: a round yeasty scent that was punctuated by the sharper aroma of cinnamon. He saw a woman barrelling through a swinging door carrying an enormous baking tray of spiral cinnamon rolls, easily four inches tall. Though the cafe was filled with people reading the newspaper or working on their laptops or engaged in conversation, heads turned almost as one, and there was suddenly a line ten people deep at the pastry counter. Al watched the baker, with her flyaway hair tamed only partially by a cap, separate each roll, pulling it apart from the rest in a puff of what Al could well imagine was fragrant steam.
Liliana walked to an open table deftly balancing a plate and two tall lattes. Al grinned at her t-shirt, somehow finding it funny even though he didn’t completely get the cultural reference. “Only YOU can prevent the zombie apocalypse,” it said, with a bear pointing admonishingly.
He soon learned that Liliana was neither tactful nor unobservant. She let him get a few caffeine hits before saying, “It looked like it affected you a lot, more than I’d expected.” Then she eyed him silently until he was forced to speak. He’d have to remember that tactic, he thought, and see how well she liked it turned on her.
“Yeah, it. It sometimes does. Actually, not as much as...yeah. Your magic; it’s the strangest I’ve ever felt.”
“You’ve always had that kind of sensitivity?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can, when I know someone really well, their magic is like, like looking at their face. It’s who they are.”
“And people you don’t know well? You can still feel it?”
“Oh, I can always feel it. But it’s like background noise. I only notice it when there’s something unexpected. Like...well, like you.”
She continued with what was starting to feel more like an interrogation. “Do you sense that there are ‘families’ of magics? Like, French people feel one way, and British another, like that?”
“Yes. No. I mean, sort of. I think it’s more like the kind of spells they use, and what power they’re drawing from. I don’t know.”
“And can you feel the relative strength of a magic user? This person’s average in power, but that person’s strong?”
“Yeah, if they do magic in front of me. It can be a simple spell that doesn’t draw much power, like Lumos, but I’d need that to tell.” Al had pushed away his coffee and was leaning back in his chair now, the roll cooling, untouched.
And as if she recognized she’d pushed him too hard, Liliana started talking about the cafe, how it’d been started in the early 70s by a women’s collective and had been a center for antiwar activists and hippies and the counterculture in general.
“Not drugs, though, and that was unusual. They always had a health emphasis here, and as excellent as their baking is, they still make these vegan bran muffins that are like the black holes of pastries. So dense. Then in the later 70s it was feminism and radical feminism, though that has always been an important thing. I mean, it’s obvious from the name.” She twisted around to look at the counter and said, “Her, with the grey hair, that’s Gwyn. She was a doctoral student in history and folklore when she was one of the original founders. She’s big into EnvironmentFirst now. And traditional Gaelic music; you’ll see pickup groups jamming here quite a bit.”
Al looked at the woman, the one with the cinnamon rolls. She’d brought out another tray, and most of them were still unseparated; it looked as if the rolls started out as single pieces that then expanded in the oven to form one big mass.
“Eat up,” Liliana said, but more gently than he’d heard her. “I got you a corner one, specially: all that crunchy caramelized sugar on two sides, and tender inside dough on the other two. Best of both worlds.”
***
Al scanned the crowds for Neville; Portkeys themselves rarely ran off schedule, so he wasn’t sure what the delay could be. Finally he saw his face bobbing above the bustle, and he stood up to wave him over. Neville’s normal mild expression broke into a big smile, and Al smiled back, a wave of affection rolling over him. Neville had always represented a calm sanctuary from other, more problematic parts of Al’s life; something different and slow-moving and purposeful.
“I got you some tea, but it’ll want warming now,” he said, pulling out a chair for him.
“Right, sorry. I don’t know what the bother was with Security this time; it took absolute ages. And I could see everyone else passing right through! It was mad.”
“Maybe you look like an international terrorist,” Al teased.
Neville grinned. “Or someone stupid enough to be carrying things for a terrorist. They nearly took my satchel apart, and I had to get quite firm with them when they wanted to open my sample bags.”
“You’re on your way back from Guatemala?” Al said.
“Yes, the Petén. There’s a type of fungus that grows on the limestone in the Tikal ruins; we use it in small amounts. I didn’t think it was the likely culprit, but you never know. Tikal was a place of immense power at one point, and I’ve had some rather eerie experiences there.”
“So this is the thing you told me about, the problem with the potion. And you’re trying to trace it through the individual ingredients.”
“Right. Draco’s doing most of the testing, but I’m doing the gathering since I’m better at the herbological identification. We’ve done 13 of the 16 so far.”
“So you’re almost done, then.”
Neville made a face. “I wish that were true. But because of the complexities of sourcing internationally, we don’t always know where a given lot of ingredients came from, and in the case of some suppliers, it could be from multiple collection points. That’s how it is with the redwoods, actually, and why it was such serendipity that you were coming here with a fairly wide-open schedule.”
Neville’s gentle tact made Al less defensive than he could have been. “Yeah, wide-open is one way to put it. No bleeding idea of what I’m meant to be doing in my life is closer to it, though.”
“You’re only 19...”
“...20 next week,” Al interrupted.
“Oh, is that a subtle hint? Thank you for the reminder.”
Al smiled back. “You don’t have to get me anything.”
“I like to,” he said. “The point is, you have all the time in the world. And you’ve just made a major life transition. Give yourself the freedom to just be.” He added, “And part of what you can be is ‘helpful,’ because I must confess that the last thing I need to be doing at this time in my life is flying dripping wet through the coastal California mist collecting pinecones from 300 feet in the air.”
“I hope you’ve more instructions for me than that.”
Neville laughed. “It really is just that simple. I need you to go to a list of about 15 groves and collect from both the crown of the tree and the groundfall. I’ll give you the bags; they’re shielded specially from magical interference since--I know I don’t need to remind you--any time we’re dealing with seeds that’s a crucial issue. Mark them carefully, then send them through every few days as Portkey cargo.”
“Sounds straightforward. So the potion’s to do with growth, that’s why the seedcones are used?”
“Growth, somewhat, due to the release of the energy of potentiality. More to do with regeneration, though. This particular potion is given in three circumstances; one is the oncological use that is our immediate concern.
“Is it one of the targeted potions that slow the cellular growth rate?” asked Al.
“No, less critical than those, in a way; this one supports the regeneration of normal tissue after surgery or potion-therapy. We also use it for tissue regeneration when a limb or other body part has been severed, from a hex or, more often, from splinching. The redwoods are known for their regenerative capabilities. I don’t know if you’ve seen this in the forests yet, but you’ll sometimes encounter mammoth trees in a perfectly straight line, as if they were planted by giants. There used to be tales about them. What it results from, rather, are the shoots that spring out of a fallen tree, all along its length. They root, and of course not all of them survive, but those that do look like they were designed along a road. What this means is that a given tree can actually be centuries, even millennia, older, in the sense of its precise genetic material. Sequoia sempervirens is rumoured to have longevity properties because of that, but that’s not an approved use, and not what Draco and I are working on.”
“You said there was a third use of it, though?”
“Yes, for victims of burning, either physical or spell-induced. Redwood bark itself is highly resistant to fire, which is one reason they live so long, so it’s indicated for those clinical uses.”
“Hmm,” Al mused, “you’d think it would be used more for retarding burns prophylactically, then.”
“Yes, also that. There is an unguent made from a bark distillate, but it’s not medical; Aurors use it, and firefighters. It’s the regenerative properties combined with the flame-resistance that make it clinically effective, though." He paused. "Are you sure I can't lure you into herbological research or potion development?"
Al looked down at his hands. "I don't know."
"You were always so good at it. But more than that, you seemed to enjoy it."
"I did."
There was a silence, then Neville said, "Sorry. I don't mean to..."
"...no, no, it's all right. I might think about it. Everything's just so..." He broke off. He couldn't explain how relieved he felt at quitting the Auror path, and yet what a failure, all at the same time. And the worst part was, no one was angry at him, or thought he'd made a mistake, no one except the more blokey members of his cohort, for whom being an Auror was a life's dream. His father had actually seemed happy about it, which made him wonder if he'd been even less successful than he'd thought at hiding his unhappiness.
"Anyway," continued Neville, "we'll test them as they come in, and be in touch. We may need you to go back to a certain grove and try to localize it even more closely." He reached into his capacious satchel and pulled out a bundle of what Al took to be the sample bags. "All right, then?"
Unlike when others said that to him, in the jovial tone that meant 'I don't actually want to hear about it if you're not,' Neville truly wanted to know.
"Maybe," he said, smiling a little, "probably. I like having something to do. And I've been to one already, so I know that it's not going to be a hardship, flying around to these forests. They're gorgeous."
"Yes, and so unlike any ecosystem in Britain. They're very strange, actually, the redwoods. They become their own self-contained individual ecosystems; fly up about 250 feet from the forest floor and you'll see what I mean."
"They've got a...a bit of a weird feeling about them. I didn't catch it that much at Muir because there were so many people around, but I did a bit. Like there's magic there, but not in a way I can recognize."
"Mmm," said Neville, "well, I've felt that quite a lot around the world. Nowhere more than at Tikal, actually. The Mayans were a culture that was different from us in so many ways. There's just a...an energy there in the ruins that doesn't feel anything like places of power in, say, Britain."
“I’m glad to be here,” Al said abruptly.
“I’m glad you are, too.” Neville looked at him, then said, “I’ve got to go; my next Portkey’s in 30 minutes. This was just a quick stop. Any news for your father I can bring back?”
“No. Just tell him I’m doing fine.”
“You know, I think you are. Or you will be.”
Al wondered if Neville had any of the Sight; he’d said that so authoritatively. If so, Al had never heard about it. But it was nice to believe that he did.
***
He spent the next few afternoons in the forests, collecting samples for Neville and learning to love these strange, lush, silent places. Cathedrals of trees, he’d heard them called, and he did feel a hushed reverence that was almost religious. He stayed off the beaten track, avoiding both park rangers and the tourists who came by the busload to some of the groves. He flew, sometimes, and hiked other times, and the strenuousness of his days--for the topography was by no means flat--brought him a serenity that he’d forgot he could feel. He hadn’t slept so well in ages. And then it all changed.
He’d had an irksome morning figuring out how to post the parcel to Neville; for international delivery it had to be sent through Portkey cargo and then Owled. But there were forms to fill out and affidavits to sign and he was put in a room to speak with a customs official because of the trees’ protected status. Once it was on its way, finally, he strode to the other end of the terminal to the Apparition pad.
He groaned when he saw the queue for whatever pastry Gwyn had just pulled out of the oven, but went to wait. There was a folk music jam going on in the corner, as there sometimes was; Gwyn herself played the tin whistle and Al had seen her come out of the kitchen once to join in. Today it was just guitar, fiddle and a kind of lap drum that looked to be made of mottled skin. The singer was someone Al had seen in the cafe; she was small, with a cloud of black hair around her pale face. She was Muggle, undoubtedly, but wore a cape that wasn’t unlike Wizard cloaks; Al had noticed her silver cloak-pin with its intricate interlace pattern. She was singing something that was at once mournful and driving:
And once it fell upon a day
A cold day and a snell,
When we were from the hunting come,
That from my horse I fell,
The Queen of Fairies she caught me,
In yon green hill to dwell.
“She’s freakishly good, isn’t she,” said Gwyn, and Al started; he hadn’t even noticed he was at the head of the queue. “Tam Lin is one of my favourite ballads, and Aislin does it more hauntingly than anybody.” She handed him his tea and a roll that was still gently steaming.
He sat, inhaling the fragrance and feeling the tension drain out. He didn’t look around until he’d sipped from his funky, mismatched porcelain cup for a good five minutes. And when he did, he looked straight into the grey eyes of Scorpius Malfoy.
Part 2...
Title: Carrying You Over
Pairing(s): Albus Severus/Scorpius
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: This story is in two (unequal) parts, with a POV change. Possessive!Scorpius; suggestions of dominance. Also: **knotting (temporary penile expansion during intercourse), but not in a bestiality context**
Word Count: 37900
Summary: In San Francisco on an errand for his father, Al Potter runs into his old friend Scorpius Malfoy, who disappeared six years prior. As the two get unwittingly caught up in larger events involving magic both old-world and new, Al wonders if some scars are too deep to heal.
Prompt: Scorpius is a wolf!animagus. (video) [submitted by vaysh11]
Notes: Title is from Patrick Wolf’s The Future, which, along with three other songs from Lupercalia--House, Together, The Days--were lyrically inspirational at various points. Other influences include Emma Bull’s War of the Oaks, from whose queen of the Unseelie Court I borrowed one line; the lady in Elizabeth Pope’s Perilous Gard; Rosemary Sutcliff’s diction; and a lifetime of reading high and urban fantasy. Also contains an homage to Tom Hardy’s eyebrows, shameless appropriation of several folklore traditions, and undoubtedly excessive reference to thinkgeek apparel. Additionally, some Yeats. For the prompter, there is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Wraeththu, several more obvious ones from LOTR, and finally, an encomium to a certain addictive substance commonly purchased in small paper bags. *g*
Carrying You Over
PART I
The thing was, Al thought much later, you didn't expect the turning point of your life to come over a plate of mediocre, at best, spag bol. But at the time he’d just been eating it dutifully in order to avoid seeing the anxious look on his father's face, reminding himself to look up every so often and nod at whatever Neville was saying. It was technical--something about an improvement to the next generation of Veritaserum, given that the Aurors had recently discovered the black-market availability of an antiserum--but Al could follow the advanced aspects with half an ear, unlike his father, for whom Neville was giving an explanation that sidetracked frequently into basic principles. He almost smiled, at the nervousness that Harry still evinced faced with Potions, and at Neville's utter lack of condescension. It had been his kindness at Hogwarts, the escape offered by the greenhouses, that had...
“Sorry, what?” he said.
“I could use you on this, if you're interested,” Neville said, but his carefulness was somehow different from the way everyone else tiptoed around him.
Al shook his head. “Can't. I'm going to the States tomorrow. Errand for dad, but I think I'll stay a bit.”
“Oh?” said Neville, looking between him and Harry.
“He's acting as a courier between the MLE and U.S. law enforcement. One of their regional offices needed some specialized information--old lore, essentially--and some of it was only available in manuscript. Malfoy Manor's library, of course, had the three books. Draco wouldn't allow a copying spell because the books still have residual magic that could be buggered up. Al's going to take them there since shrinking them to post would also have been risky.”
“Fancy that,” said Neville. “I've been working with Draco as well. He heads up Potions and Pharmacology at Mungo's, you know”--he directed that at Al--”and we've both been involved in issues of ingredient purity, importation standards, things of that nature.”
He and Harry launched into a discussion of some proposed legislation on trade sanctions and how they were or were not encouraging illegal importation of restricted ingredients, and Al drifted off again, picking at his dinner, only tuning back in when Neville stood up and said, “I'm off. I've got an early Portkey to Guatemala tomorrow. Al, you have a fantastic time; as tired as I am of traveling at the moment, it's good to get away from here occasionally. Where are you off to, exactly?”
“San Francisco, in northern California.”
“Really!” said Neville. “How odd! That's on my travel agenda next week, but I wonder if I could impose on you to collect the samples.”
“Is this about the ingredient purity work?”
“Yes, Draco and I have been burning the candle at both ends trying to sort it. Draco's at his wits' end, actually. One of his key oncology potions has had a statistically significant failure rate; of course with cancer nothing's ever 100%, so it took awhile to put it together, but he's realized that the tumor cases from the last three months have had atypical results.”
He put on his cloak. “If you like, I could meet you in San Francisco in a few days, on my way back from Tikal. I'll explain then what the sample collection entails. But I think you might find it enjoyable; I would, if I had the time to do it. The Sequoia sempervirens groves are one of the wonders of the natural world. You'll love them, Al.”
After he left, Harry turned to Al with the determined cheerfulness that had started to grate on him. “Maybe you’ll like getting back into herbology work: you were always good at that.”
“Well, I was good at everything, wasn't I. I did everything anyone could have wanted.”
Harry looked as if Al had slapped him. “Is that...is that why you joined? Al, you know I never wanted you to follow in my footsteps, any of you.”
“Not much danger of Jamie doing that.” He regretted the sharpness in his voice immediately. But how could he explain to his father when he didn't understand it himself, the feeling that it had been up to him to...something. With the divorce such a monumental cock-up, and then Jamie...it hadn't even seemed like a choice anymore, entering Auror training.
“Al,” said Harry, stricken. Al had seen him bring an entire room to order with a few brisk words, had seen him take on the International Confederation of Wizards in a towering rage and leave the room with every concession granted, had seen him in court with his face like thunder taking a barrister apart, argument by argument. With his children, though, it was as if every bit of armour were stripped, leaving him exposed and vulnerable.
“Dad,” Al said, his anger trickling away into the suffocating apathy that had become his norm. “Maybe you're right. I'll do some herbology for Neville, make myself useful. That'll be good.” He continued on in that vein until his father stopped looking shattered, and hugged him before heading up to bed, surprised to find a tiny seed of optimism taking root after all.
***
The SFWPD was a good deal grungier than the MLE, but Al rather liked it after the glitz of the International Portkey Terminal. He walked down the corridor, noticing the scuffed tile floor, the heavy oak benches, and the bulletin boards covered with fliers and announcements. There was a smell of slightly burnt coffee, and as he passed doorways he heard snatches of talk that made the place seem cheerful despite its busy intensity.
Led by a secretary who insisted he sit, he found himself in front of the Chief Detective’s imposing, and terribly messy, desk, listening to half of a conversation.
“Jesus fuck, Xiwen, they’d only been back on the street a week! Less!” The man let out a bark of laughter. “Well, pound a cold one for me. And don’t let Rodriguez pull any more douchebag moves like he did with that gang, who was it, the Blackheads. No, the Black Skulls. Whatever, more like numbskulls.” He laughed again at something she said. “Well, they are like zits on the ass cheeks of humanity. Mm hmm, later, babe. Keep me updated.” He disconnected and fixed Al with a bright gaze. “Al Potter,” he said. “It couldn’t be anyone else.” He stoood and reached a hand across his desk, and Al rose to shake it.
“Yeah, I look a lot like my dad.”
“Taller, though, by quite a bit,” he said, squinting at Al in assessment. “He’s a bit of a shrimp. Agile as hell, though, and a rockstar on a broom. You fly?”
“Some. Less since school.”
“Maybe you’ll get some in while you’re here. It’s beautiful up the coast.”
Al nodded politely, wondering when he could sit down. Americans were quite a bit less formal, he’d been told by a number of people; still, it didn’t feel right to do so without any invitation. “I want to thank you for meeting with me, Detective DiMatteo,” he said, in an unconscious effort to get the dynamic on more familiar ground. The other man just looked startled.
“The only person who calls me that is a circuit court judge whose life’s purpose is to make my life hell on earth. So just Paul’s good.”
“No one calls you Paul, either,” called his secretary from the other room.
“She’s right. Pauly. Kid’s nickname I’m still carrying around at age 50.” He gave a comical grimace. “Pauly DiMatteo, bad ass cop; doesn’t exactly make you tremble in your boots, does it?” He sat, finally, and Al did, too.
“Sorry for, um, mispronouncing your name, sir. I thought it was DEmaTAYoh, like the Chaser for Naples.”
“Nah, Dim-MAT-ee-oh. Probably a Jersey thing; we’re all about being so old-country, but real Italians think we’re like a different species. I suppose I should just be grateful those bastards at Ellis Island didn’t Americanize it to Matthews.”
Al had no idea what he was talking about, and it must’ve shown, because Pauly said, “Main point of immigration until the mid-twentieth century. My father’s parents came over from Calabria after the Second World War. Didn’t speak a word of English. They’re in their nineties and still don’t; they go on in this crazy village dialect that probably five people in the world still understand.”
“Were they, um, part of the wizarding world?” asked Al, confused because weren’t language spells in common use decades ago?
“God, no. Muggles, the whole lot of them. It’s my mother who is, sort of; she’s what you Brits call a Squib. But three of my siblings are magic users, and me.” He paused, cocking his head a little. “We don’t have much of that pure-blood crap that you folks get so hot and bothered about. Maybe it’s because almost no one is, or maybe no one is because we don’t give a fuck about it. Hard to say.” He paused, then went on. “But that’s what your dad tried to fix 25 years ago, as I understand it. And did a pretty fair job of it, am I right?”
“It’s still an issue,” Al said, thinking it through as he spoke. “But in the opposite way. People are still suspicious of pure-bloods, especially the ones whose families were involved in the Voldemort Wars. They’re... It’s harder for them.”
Pauly nodded. “Swing of the pendulum. That’s the kind of thing that makes it never ending, though: that cycle of resentment and grievance. In fact...” He looked ready to launch into a topic that Al, for a number of reasons, found interesting, when there was a perfunctory knock on the door, and a voice said, “Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got a meeting in a second and then I have to haul ass across town to the DA.”
Al turned to see a woman wearing knee-length fatigues and flip flops; despite the casual appearance, it was somehow clear that she was in law enforcement. Al caught a glimpse of a tattoo spiralling up the back of her neck, ending in what looked like a few words behind her ear. She dropped the folder she was carrying on the desk, then turned to Al.
“Hi,” she said, holding out her hand, “I’m Liliana Vargas.” The part of her right arm not covered by her t-shirt was a mass of ink, graceful swirls in red, green and blue. Al saw leaf patterns, with vines and some exquisitely shaded flowers.
He raised his eyes, feeling caught out. “Al Potter,” he said. Then, “Sorry, didn’t mean to stare; it’s just...” He looked at it again. “Beautiful.”
“Thanks,” she said, without smiling, just watching him. There was none of the coquettishness that he sometimes--often--got back home, where he’d never known if it was because of how he looked or who his father was. He realized suddenly that he’d have anonymity here; he wouldn’t, except in this office, be ‘Harry Potter’s son, the one who wasn’t a fuckup.’
Liliana launched into quickfire Spanish at Pauly, who mostly listened, nodding. Al eased himself back into his chair, taking the opportunity to look around the office. He let his thoughts wander, still tired from the international Portkey, and came back into alertness when the conversation switched to English.
“Whatever,” Liliana was saying. “I’ve got to go. I’m late, and I don’t want him to disappear on me like he did last time; he just returned, and I want those fresh impressions.” She turned to go, calling out to Al on her way out the door, “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” he said, but she was gone.
“She moves at double speed 95% of the time,” Pauly said. “Outstanding detective, one of my best. She leads my tracker unit.” Al thought he was about to say more when his iPhone rang. “Shit,” he said, looking at the number, “I’ve got to take this. Listen, why don’t you give me the package from your father, and make an appointment with Mary Ellen to come back tomorrow so we can finish up.” Al was aware that Pauly had been charged by Harry to keep an eye on him. Before, he’d been too apathetic to mind. Now, after meeting him, he still didn’t mind, but in a different way. By the time he’d taken the three fragile tomes--one a 15th c. codex in manuscript, the others early printed books--from his satchel and set them on the desk, Pauly was already speaking rapidly into his phone, but he raised a hand, mouthing ‘see you tomorrow’ when Al glanced back from the doorway.
*
Al was back in the corridor 15 minutes later, after a succinct tutorial on using his loaner iPhone.
“I’ve heard you don’t use them in England,” Pauly’s secretary had said in her gravelly voice. She clearly considered this inconceivable. “What do you do to communicate?”
“Well, there’s the Floo, and Firecalling, and there are Owls everywhere and they’re quite fast. The Aurors use charmed mirrors quite a lot, or a Patronus sometimes. I don’t know, we Apparate to talk to people if it’s urgent.”
“I suppose that might work in a smaller country,” she said doubtfully, then handed him the phone. “Well, here it is, and I’ve written down your phone number if you want to give it to...well, I don’t know who, if no one has them in your country.” She looked nonplussed at that all over again, but forged on. “That one’s de-accessioned from the evidence room. Don’t worry, we’ve cleared all the drug lords out of the contacts,” she said, clearly inviting Al to smile; he sensed that it was all true, though. Merlin, what a country. For all its vibrancy and enthusiasm for innovative technology, it seemed unmoored, spinning out of control. Or maybe it seemed more that way because the Muggle and Wizarding worlds here were intertwined to an extent almost unimaginable in England. Al came back to attention, realizing he’d missed part of her explanation. “...and you should get an email address, if you know what that is.”
“I do, actually. My father has to know about the internet for when he works with Muggles, especially ones abroad, so he’s had a laptop for awhile. It doesn’t work that well around magic, though.”
“Well, these do; they’re specially made for magic users. One of Apple’s chief engineers is a witch, a level 7.” Al was scrolling through the apps in fascination and she watched him, amused. “Go along, then. We’ll see you back here at 2:00 tomorrow, and you can come by a little earlier if you’re having any trouble with it.”
Al walked slowly down the corridor, wondering what something called Fruit Ninja could possibly be, when something wriggled its way into his consciousness. It was... He stopped, pocketing the phone absent-mindedly so he could concentrate. It was someone’s magic, and it felt known and yet not; it was maddeningly, tantalizingly familiar, but just beyond the edge of his reach. It... He shook his head, as if that would clear the confusion. He saw two more rooms before the lift, and peered into both; no, just offices, one full of records and clerks who were sending documents flying into their appropriate resting place one by one; the other was a conference room with four people arguing around a table, a 3D map of the city slowly rotating in the air between them. By the time he’d got to the lift, the sense was gone and the strange excitement with it, leaving him tired, and deflated, and wondering why this--the trip, all of it--had seemed like a good idea, as if escape were ever really possible, especially when you were running from yourself.
***
He’d shaken off his mood, however, some hours later, and was whistling as he waited for his toast. He leaned against the counter, examining his hands. He’d not had broom callouses in a while; the tender skin, and the ache in his back, and his chapped lips--it was discomfort that nevertheless felt comfortable, somehow. How had he let it go so long since he’d flown? Really flown, all out, crouched almost parallel to his broom, the wind making his eyes water. He’d gone higher than he had in ages, too, inspired by the sight in the distance of the redwoods. Or maybe by the desire to get above the fog, which had stealthily soaked his cloak before he pulled up and fumbled with his wand. Almost dropped it, in fact; he’d have to get some gloves tomorrow.
He was crunching his fifth piece of toast--the bread here was fantastic, fantastic--and paging through the Redwood Parks Guide he’d found earlier on the kitchen table, when his head jerked up at the sound of a knock. He was the only one staying at the house, for the moment, and no one knew he was here, and... He drew his wand, but before he could even stand he heard the door closing and a voice saying, “Hello? You home? I come bearing...” and by then she was in the doorway, so instead of finishing the sentence she held up the six pack.
“Local brew,” Liliana said, setting it on the counter, then alarming Al by turning an unmistakably evaluative frown on him. “Huh. You looked older this afternoon. Maybe it was the clothes. You know what, though, I don’t care if you’re legal or not, I need a drink.” She went right to the drawer that held the bottle opener, then grabbed two by the neck and took a chair as if it were her regular. “Cheers,” she said, pushing one across the table.
“Do Americans say that?” he asked, following her lead and taking a long swig.
“Americans say whatever the fuck they want,” Liliana answered. She had rings on, now; wide silver ones, mostly, and some matched the studs around the outside of her ears. “Haven’t you got that yet? They take whatever’s good and turn it into their own. Culture vultures.” She leaned her head back and downed half the beer. “Not a criticism, just an observation.”
“Why do you say ‘They take’? They take whatever’s good...”
“Oh, I have to feel like the angry outsider or all’s not right with my world,” she said, and startled Al by smiling brilliantly. It eased the rather hard lines of her face. “Are you getting settled? You looked like a lost soul today at Pauly’s.”
“I’d just Portkeyed in,” he said, sitting up straighter. “It lags you. I was okay after I slept for awhile.”
“And flew to see the redwoods.”
“How’d you know?” He hadn’t intended to do it; it’d been a spur of the moment thing when he’d woken up, disturbed by a dream he couldn’t remember, and just needing to get out of his head by pushing his body.
“One, you have that post-coital look that people get after they’ve seen them for the first time,” she said. “Exhibit two is there.” She pointed to Al’s broom in the corner, twigs still darkened from the wet. “Very nice, by the way. I understand you’re the equivalent of Quidditch royalty over there.”
“Just my mum and my cousin,” he started to mutter before realizing she was teasing.
“And three,” she said, returning to her list, “I thought you’d find them intriguing.” She gestured at the guidebook. “Hard not to, once you see the pictures.”
“You left it for me?” he said. “I’m...uh, thank you.”
She raised her beer to him in a gesture that looked half mocking, but Al was starting to see that that was her default register.
“I didn’t actually plan to go all the way there,” he said, “but I saw them from the air and then I had to land.” He’d followed a tour group around, unable not to when he overheard the guide saying that the tallest living things on the planet, and some of the oldest, were here, in these last scattered parks along the northern California coast, the remnants of a forest that was once two million acres.
“You flew all the way there? Because the book’s got the App coordinates.”
“Flew. It was only 12 miles to Muir Woods, and I wanted to see the coast anyway.”
“Muir’s not the biggest, but it’s at the point that you start thinking a 250 foot tree isn’t tall enough for you that you have to take a step back. That’s American, too; everything’s got to be the biggest or the deepest or the sparkliest or whatever damn thing. And it’s a wizarding fetish, too, you know? The oldest this or the rarest that. So you combine that in American wizards, and you see why I never have to worry about my job security. There’s always going to be crazy people motivated by the extremes.”
“It is true, sometimes,” Al pointed out. “Power is drawn to the extremes.”
“Yes, and that’s why it blows up in their faces half the time. Metaphorically. But literally, once or twice.” She rolled her eyes. “Wizards. I didn’t grow up with ‘em, so excuse what Pauly calls my ‘jaundiced’ view.”
“But...you’re one of us, right? One of them,” he fumbled. “A wizard.” He knew he was blushing.
“I’m a magic user, of sorts,” she said, leaning back in her chair and stretching for another beer. She didn’t open it right away, though, but ran her finger through the condensation. Her head was tilted down, and Al saw three small rings in her eyebrow that he hadn’t noticed before. “Pauly tell you what I do in the department?”
“He said you were a tracker.” His notion of what that entailed was vague.
“Yep. I do a little of the admin stuff now, but I started out purely in the field. Chasing the bad guys, tracking ‘em. And I’m the tracker I am because of the other senses I can call upon. You know what a coyote is?”
“Like a...is it like a fox?”
“It’s a species of canine, related to wolves. Extraordinarily acute sense of smell, a lot of speed and endurance, exceptional hearing...you see how that could come in handy?”
Al looked at her blankly before it clicked. “Oh, so you’re an Animagus,” he said, the tracking suddenly clear.
“No.” Her voice was sharp. “Words have meaning and power that can’t be forced into the space made for them by another language.”
“But...er, you call them something different here? Sorry, I didn’t...” Al found her terrifying. She made him feel like a bumbling puppy, and he should have resented it.
“I’m a skinwalker. Ever heard of that?”
He shook his head.
“Navajo word’s yee naaldlooshii. They’re feared and hated; my grandfather had lots of stories about skinwalkers’ evil deeds. Even more so after everyone found out I was one. It’s not that common, a woman skinwalker. That made it worse. I got blamed for a lot of things that went wrong on the rez.”
“Like what?” Al asked, clearing his throat when the first word came out in a croak. Even knowing the stories of his father’s childhood, it disturbed him, the idea of someone being loathed for what they were, naturally, with no way of being anything else.
“Car accidents. A well gone bad. A kid who started having seizures. Kids born with Down syndrome.” She shrugged and took a long swallow, banging it down when she was done. “But hey! I got out of there. I went to my grandmother’s sister’s for my last two years of high school; she’s Sandia Pueblo. They have the same ideas, but no one there knew I was. Until spring of senior year, but by then I just had to wait it out.”
The difference between an Animagus and a skinwalker was brutally clear. As an uncommon ability, Animagi were respected for the skill and magical strength they represented. Al didn’t even know when there’d last been someone who’d achieved it at school. And even in the Ministry, or the Aurors, he only knew of a few Animagi (though a few others were rumoured, and he’d been a part of more than one drunken conversation speculating on the animal forms various people would take).
“So you...” He hesitated, trying to work out how to articulate it. “You weren’t trying to transform? Because, with an Animagus, it takes a lot of work, and most people can’t do it anyway.”
“I know an Animagus,” she said, “and from what I can tell it’s a completely different kind of magic. But when we’re in our animal forms, it’s the same. Different paths to get there, but we experience our animal the same. He can stay longer in it, though; I get itchy. He...” Liliana took a swig, keeping her eyes on him the whole time; something about her gaze made him tense. “He prefers it. There’s a distance from human crap that you get, emotions and all that. Kind of nice--it got me through high school, that’s for fucking sure--but you can see how it could get out of hand.”
Al nodded.
“That’s why we have alcohol,” she said, brandishing her beer a little. “Get a little buzzed, dull the pain, but you gotta get up and face the shit the next day.” But then suddenly the edgy mood dissipated as she added, “Nothing worse than a hangover and a screaming kid who needs her diaper changed, though. So my wild days are long gone.”
Al was relieved that the conversation moved into lighter paths, and was surprised when, sometime later, he glanced at the clock and saw that two hours had gone by.
“Did we really kill that six? Damn. Don’t tell Pauly I corrupted you like this; he’ll have my head.”
“Why, because he told you to keep an eye on me? I’m not actually a kid, whatever he and my dad think. I don’t need minding.”
“Is that what you think?” Al couldn’t have made even a stab of a guess at what was going on behind her inscrutable face. “That I’m doing this for Pauly?”
Al didn’t bother nodding, because obviously.
She stood up, cracked her back rather ostentatiously, and wiggled her toes into her flip flops. She then gathered the six empties and dropped them in the recycling bin. Al didn’t take his eyes off her.
“Nah,” she threw over her shoulder just before the door clicked shut, “he’s not the one.”
***
Al realized when he stood up how pissed he was, and it wasn’t a feeling he relished. He closed his eyes and concentrated, then cast Sobrietas on himself, which wasn’t a particularly easy spell to do properly, even when one was sober and casting it on someone else. It was something he’d worked hard to achieve, once upon a time, not because he was drunk often, but because it was known to be difficult and--yeah, now he remembered; it had been after sixth year and he’d been doing a Patronus since the fall but had made precisely zero headway on becoming an Animagus. The magic had been beyond him, and that had been galling; it might have been the first thing he’d failed at. Well, that he cared about, at any rate; there were plenty of things that he was just as happy to be pants at, like Divination.
But to be an Animagus: that dream had lit his imagination from the earliest days of listening to his father tell stories about his own father and Sirius Black and Teddy’s father. Of course, Remus Lupin hadn’t actually been one, and that made Al wonder if a skinwalker--if the meaning of a skinwalker--was more like a werewolf than an Animagus. It was hard to imagine a girl’s family shunning her like Liliana’s had; but then, it was strange hearing his father talk about what it had used to be like for werewolves.
Al looked in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, tilting his head up to see his jaw. Not enough to shave, really, which was a bit of a pity because he found it relaxing, the warmth, and the foamy soap that smelled faintly of bergamot, and the slow, careful strokes of the blade. He liked to be clean-shaven, and more than that, he liked boys who were. On their face, and on their chest, and... He could feel himself rising in his boxers, and by the time he’d extinguished all the lights and locked the door, he was fully erect. It had been a week since he’d wanked, maybe longer; it had got to the point, back in those last endless days with the Aurors, that he’d wondered if he’d been hit with an Impotentia hex. But he’d screened negative in their routine weekly checks, so he was forced to conclude that it was yet another way he was failing in his life.
Seeing his dick, hard, was a bit like seeing an old friend you weren’t expecting. He pushed the duvet aside and lay down on his back, grinning a little when his dick popped through the slit in his boxers. “Glad you decided to make an appearance,” he said, taking it in hand and giving it a couple of dry strokes. He reached for the lube with his other hand, and felt a tingle of anticipation as he slicked up his hand. He’d initially got the lube when he’d woken up to the fact that fingering got him off harder than anything, and now he used it on his cock, too, never so glad he wasn’t a Muggle as when he lay there with chest and stomach a mess of semen, lube somehow everywhere, and the sweat drying on his skin. A quick cleaning spell, and he could fall asleep with the pleasure still tingling on his skin.
He wondered if being in the U.S. would return some of his interest in, if not sex, then at least wanking. Just being away from it all--the Aurors, and Britain, and the endless scrutiny on him--had to help. And he associated being here with sexual freedom, ever since his very first encounter, the summer before seventh year. He’d been at the national junior team summer camp, to train for a month-long series of exhibitions against other junior teams. The camp had been meant to provide the teams with experience encountering other styles of play.
He’d been deep in the closet, but it had been an almost painfully clichéd scene: last one in the locker room (or so he thought), then entering the showers only to see one of the U.S. players under the spray, head back and eyes closed, pulling on the most beautiful, thick cock that Al had ever imagined. He could still visualize the boy’s full bottom lip, white where his teeth were digging into it as he trembled, his other hand on his balls moving restlessly. The moment when Al looked up the sleek torso, so much more developed than his, to see the boy watching him--god, that horrifying moment of panic that he’d been disastrously outed--followed by the sheer stupefaction of hearing him say, “Come here”: he really didn’t think he’d ever forget it even though at the time his mind was chaos. He’d gone close, still idiotically trying to hide his own erection behind a towel, but the boy had thrown it to the changing benches, squirted some soap on Al’s hand, and said, “Help me out?” Then he’d closed Al’s fingers around his cock, and done the same to Al’s, and even though the boy had started much closer to orgasm than Al, they both went off at the same time, Al’s triggered by the boy’s nonchalant sensuality and the mind-blowing feel of a hard cock that wasn’t his in his hand.
“Whew,” the boy had breathed out as he squeezed the last feeble squirts onto Al’s belly. “It’s always more awesome with someone else’s hand.” He turned into the shower spray and rubbed at his stomach and hands. “Whew,” he said again. “Thanks.” When Al didn’t say anything, he turned his head and looked inquiring. “You okay? We cool?”
“Uh, yeah,” Al managed, voice husky then squeaking, as it hadn’t done in more than a year. God, he hated puberty.
“Oh, you’re one of the Brits,” he said. “I thought you looked familiar. We scrimmaged you yesterday, right?”
It felt surreal, chatting about their respective teams while their cocks shrunk back to their normal state, but in the end that was what made it something he remembered with bemusement rather than a full-blown freak out. He’d not had another encounter that summer (having no idea how to make one happen), but he went back to school less in denial about his sexuality and more able to wank without guilt over the images in his head. But no one was out at Hogwarts, only the rumor of a fifth-year Hufflepuff who’d allegedly offered to suck another boy off.
It hadn’t been until the following summer, at Finistère after he’d left school but before he started Auror training, that he had his second encounter. He’d begged to be allowed to go to Paris for a few days, alone, and since it was his father there that week, not his mother, he’d hardly had to whinge to get his agreement. He’d gone to a bar in the Marais the first night, terrified and awkward. A few beers later, he was able to answer when a trio of rowdy Aussie travellers asked him something, and they bought him a shot of something fiery, and then a few more, and Al found himself on his knees in the less-than-pristine loo, sucking the head of a cock enthusiastically but apparently with a bit too much tooth. He leaned his cheek against the cool of the metal door, moaning happily at the feel of rough fingers against, then shoving in, his arse. Thinking about it later, he was appalled at his passivity and amazed that he hadn’t lost his virginity with spit for lube. But the man was either too careful or too decent or too cognizant of the fact that Al knew nothing about this, because he merely gave Al the handjob of his life while twisting his fingers in a way that made Al almost black out when he came. He came back to awareness while the man was scrubbing with a handful of loo paper at Al’s back.
He'd gone back the next night. He could see blokes pulling all around him, but felt helpless to make anything happen, and whether that was because he looked as awkward and out of place as he felt, he didn't know. He went back to Finistère and thence to London to start Auror training feeling better, however, and though he thought once or twice about trying a Muggle gay bar, it seemed too overwhelming, not to mention risky.
He'd instead spent the past year experimenting with what got him off, and though he didn't immediately pursue what had been so obvious in the dirty toilet stall of a Paris club, he couldn't avoid it for long. It had been a long time now since he'd wanked without using the fingers of his other hand; in fact, the few days that he'd had his left hand salved and gauzed for a magical burn, its absence had made him itchy and unsatisfied. He liked the feeling of his body closing around two fingers, then three; he liked the tingle of the sensitive nerves around the opening; he couldn't always get the right angle to reach his prostate, but even without it, he had the strongest, most wracking orgasms of his life like this.
He started to pant and grind down on his one hand while snapping up into the slick tightness of his other, and suddenly he wasn't remembering that toilet stall anymore; his mind was back in the hallway of the SFWPD feeling a strange magic, but before he could even wonder at that he was spilling hot over his fist, pumping up in the same rhythm that his body was contracting around his fingers.
He cleaned up and wrapped the bedclothes close, the echoes of his orgasm still rippling through him, sparking occasionally as from a fire that'd been banked for the night.
***
Al woke up early, still lagged, and the sun rose as he went through the guidebook methodically, making a list of the forests he would visit, prioritizing them by percentage of old growth. Not that he actually saw the sunrise; it was more a gradual lightening of fog from charcoal to grey to silver. He dressed in jeans and a jumper since he’d inevitably be around Muggles (though he’d seen few robes in Wizarding areas, either), and was just shrinking the book and a bottle of water when he heard a knock.
“Yo, ‘s me.”
Al unlocked it with his wand and Liliana strolled in. “Didn’t think I’d find you up so early,” she commented.
“Why’d you come by, then?” Al couldn’t help but be amused.
“Prickly conscience,” she said. “I was worried you’d be a little worse for the wear this morning.”
“Oi, come on, it was only 3 beers.”
“Three Belgian tripels with 9.8% alcohol,” Liliana corrected. “Significant difference.”
“I told you before, I’m not actually a child.”
“Yeah, yeah. Ready to go? We’ll Side-Along it.” She took his arm and rolled her eyes. “You’ll see.”
The Apparition felt...well, it didn’t feel like any Side-Along he’d ever done. And now that he’d been made aware of it, he could feel the strangeness in her magic, like it was made of sand and bones and an endless pitiless sun. It throbbed around him, her magic did, and he knew he must look as discombobulated as he felt. She was either tactful or unobservant, however, because though she kept hold of his arm, she said easily, “Here we are, the best cafe in Berkeley, and the best muffins in the Bay Area.”
He looked at the shop window, for something to focus on. ‘Sheela na Gig,’ he read. “It’s, er, Irish?”
“Not really,” she said, applying a gradually-dissipating Finite to the Disillusionment, and herding him inside. “Single? Double? Capp? I’m buying.”
“Er, latte,” said Al, who rather desperately wanted tea but knew the chances of getting a decent cup were negligible. He waited for Liliana next to what was obviously a community bulletin board, with notices about yoga, reflexology, baby massage, a playgroup cooperative (“no toy weapons, organic snacks only please”), a queer film festival, an EnvironmentFirst protest, and countless other things of that nature. He turned when his nose was assailed by a delicious smell: a round yeasty scent that was punctuated by the sharper aroma of cinnamon. He saw a woman barrelling through a swinging door carrying an enormous baking tray of spiral cinnamon rolls, easily four inches tall. Though the cafe was filled with people reading the newspaper or working on their laptops or engaged in conversation, heads turned almost as one, and there was suddenly a line ten people deep at the pastry counter. Al watched the baker, with her flyaway hair tamed only partially by a cap, separate each roll, pulling it apart from the rest in a puff of what Al could well imagine was fragrant steam.
Liliana walked to an open table deftly balancing a plate and two tall lattes. Al grinned at her t-shirt, somehow finding it funny even though he didn’t completely get the cultural reference. “Only YOU can prevent the zombie apocalypse,” it said, with a bear pointing admonishingly.
He soon learned that Liliana was neither tactful nor unobservant. She let him get a few caffeine hits before saying, “It looked like it affected you a lot, more than I’d expected.” Then she eyed him silently until he was forced to speak. He’d have to remember that tactic, he thought, and see how well she liked it turned on her.
“Yeah, it. It sometimes does. Actually, not as much as...yeah. Your magic; it’s the strangest I’ve ever felt.”
“You’ve always had that kind of sensitivity?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can, when I know someone really well, their magic is like, like looking at their face. It’s who they are.”
“And people you don’t know well? You can still feel it?”
“Oh, I can always feel it. But it’s like background noise. I only notice it when there’s something unexpected. Like...well, like you.”
She continued with what was starting to feel more like an interrogation. “Do you sense that there are ‘families’ of magics? Like, French people feel one way, and British another, like that?”
“Yes. No. I mean, sort of. I think it’s more like the kind of spells they use, and what power they’re drawing from. I don’t know.”
“And can you feel the relative strength of a magic user? This person’s average in power, but that person’s strong?”
“Yeah, if they do magic in front of me. It can be a simple spell that doesn’t draw much power, like Lumos, but I’d need that to tell.” Al had pushed away his coffee and was leaning back in his chair now, the roll cooling, untouched.
And as if she recognized she’d pushed him too hard, Liliana started talking about the cafe, how it’d been started in the early 70s by a women’s collective and had been a center for antiwar activists and hippies and the counterculture in general.
“Not drugs, though, and that was unusual. They always had a health emphasis here, and as excellent as their baking is, they still make these vegan bran muffins that are like the black holes of pastries. So dense. Then in the later 70s it was feminism and radical feminism, though that has always been an important thing. I mean, it’s obvious from the name.” She twisted around to look at the counter and said, “Her, with the grey hair, that’s Gwyn. She was a doctoral student in history and folklore when she was one of the original founders. She’s big into EnvironmentFirst now. And traditional Gaelic music; you’ll see pickup groups jamming here quite a bit.”
Al looked at the woman, the one with the cinnamon rolls. She’d brought out another tray, and most of them were still unseparated; it looked as if the rolls started out as single pieces that then expanded in the oven to form one big mass.
“Eat up,” Liliana said, but more gently than he’d heard her. “I got you a corner one, specially: all that crunchy caramelized sugar on two sides, and tender inside dough on the other two. Best of both worlds.”
***
Al scanned the crowds for Neville; Portkeys themselves rarely ran off schedule, so he wasn’t sure what the delay could be. Finally he saw his face bobbing above the bustle, and he stood up to wave him over. Neville’s normal mild expression broke into a big smile, and Al smiled back, a wave of affection rolling over him. Neville had always represented a calm sanctuary from other, more problematic parts of Al’s life; something different and slow-moving and purposeful.
“I got you some tea, but it’ll want warming now,” he said, pulling out a chair for him.
“Right, sorry. I don’t know what the bother was with Security this time; it took absolute ages. And I could see everyone else passing right through! It was mad.”
“Maybe you look like an international terrorist,” Al teased.
Neville grinned. “Or someone stupid enough to be carrying things for a terrorist. They nearly took my satchel apart, and I had to get quite firm with them when they wanted to open my sample bags.”
“You’re on your way back from Guatemala?” Al said.
“Yes, the Petén. There’s a type of fungus that grows on the limestone in the Tikal ruins; we use it in small amounts. I didn’t think it was the likely culprit, but you never know. Tikal was a place of immense power at one point, and I’ve had some rather eerie experiences there.”
“So this is the thing you told me about, the problem with the potion. And you’re trying to trace it through the individual ingredients.”
“Right. Draco’s doing most of the testing, but I’m doing the gathering since I’m better at the herbological identification. We’ve done 13 of the 16 so far.”
“So you’re almost done, then.”
Neville made a face. “I wish that were true. But because of the complexities of sourcing internationally, we don’t always know where a given lot of ingredients came from, and in the case of some suppliers, it could be from multiple collection points. That’s how it is with the redwoods, actually, and why it was such serendipity that you were coming here with a fairly wide-open schedule.”
Neville’s gentle tact made Al less defensive than he could have been. “Yeah, wide-open is one way to put it. No bleeding idea of what I’m meant to be doing in my life is closer to it, though.”
“You’re only 19...”
“...20 next week,” Al interrupted.
“Oh, is that a subtle hint? Thank you for the reminder.”
Al smiled back. “You don’t have to get me anything.”
“I like to,” he said. “The point is, you have all the time in the world. And you’ve just made a major life transition. Give yourself the freedom to just be.” He added, “And part of what you can be is ‘helpful,’ because I must confess that the last thing I need to be doing at this time in my life is flying dripping wet through the coastal California mist collecting pinecones from 300 feet in the air.”
“I hope you’ve more instructions for me than that.”
Neville laughed. “It really is just that simple. I need you to go to a list of about 15 groves and collect from both the crown of the tree and the groundfall. I’ll give you the bags; they’re shielded specially from magical interference since--I know I don’t need to remind you--any time we’re dealing with seeds that’s a crucial issue. Mark them carefully, then send them through every few days as Portkey cargo.”
“Sounds straightforward. So the potion’s to do with growth, that’s why the seedcones are used?”
“Growth, somewhat, due to the release of the energy of potentiality. More to do with regeneration, though. This particular potion is given in three circumstances; one is the oncological use that is our immediate concern.
“Is it one of the targeted potions that slow the cellular growth rate?” asked Al.
“No, less critical than those, in a way; this one supports the regeneration of normal tissue after surgery or potion-therapy. We also use it for tissue regeneration when a limb or other body part has been severed, from a hex or, more often, from splinching. The redwoods are known for their regenerative capabilities. I don’t know if you’ve seen this in the forests yet, but you’ll sometimes encounter mammoth trees in a perfectly straight line, as if they were planted by giants. There used to be tales about them. What it results from, rather, are the shoots that spring out of a fallen tree, all along its length. They root, and of course not all of them survive, but those that do look like they were designed along a road. What this means is that a given tree can actually be centuries, even millennia, older, in the sense of its precise genetic material. Sequoia sempervirens is rumoured to have longevity properties because of that, but that’s not an approved use, and not what Draco and I are working on.”
“You said there was a third use of it, though?”
“Yes, for victims of burning, either physical or spell-induced. Redwood bark itself is highly resistant to fire, which is one reason they live so long, so it’s indicated for those clinical uses.”
“Hmm,” Al mused, “you’d think it would be used more for retarding burns prophylactically, then.”
“Yes, also that. There is an unguent made from a bark distillate, but it’s not medical; Aurors use it, and firefighters. It’s the regenerative properties combined with the flame-resistance that make it clinically effective, though." He paused. "Are you sure I can't lure you into herbological research or potion development?"
Al looked down at his hands. "I don't know."
"You were always so good at it. But more than that, you seemed to enjoy it."
"I did."
There was a silence, then Neville said, "Sorry. I don't mean to..."
"...no, no, it's all right. I might think about it. Everything's just so..." He broke off. He couldn't explain how relieved he felt at quitting the Auror path, and yet what a failure, all at the same time. And the worst part was, no one was angry at him, or thought he'd made a mistake, no one except the more blokey members of his cohort, for whom being an Auror was a life's dream. His father had actually seemed happy about it, which made him wonder if he'd been even less successful than he'd thought at hiding his unhappiness.
"Anyway," continued Neville, "we'll test them as they come in, and be in touch. We may need you to go back to a certain grove and try to localize it even more closely." He reached into his capacious satchel and pulled out a bundle of what Al took to be the sample bags. "All right, then?"
Unlike when others said that to him, in the jovial tone that meant 'I don't actually want to hear about it if you're not,' Neville truly wanted to know.
"Maybe," he said, smiling a little, "probably. I like having something to do. And I've been to one already, so I know that it's not going to be a hardship, flying around to these forests. They're gorgeous."
"Yes, and so unlike any ecosystem in Britain. They're very strange, actually, the redwoods. They become their own self-contained individual ecosystems; fly up about 250 feet from the forest floor and you'll see what I mean."
"They've got a...a bit of a weird feeling about them. I didn't catch it that much at Muir because there were so many people around, but I did a bit. Like there's magic there, but not in a way I can recognize."
"Mmm," said Neville, "well, I've felt that quite a lot around the world. Nowhere more than at Tikal, actually. The Mayans were a culture that was different from us in so many ways. There's just a...an energy there in the ruins that doesn't feel anything like places of power in, say, Britain."
“I’m glad to be here,” Al said abruptly.
“I’m glad you are, too.” Neville looked at him, then said, “I’ve got to go; my next Portkey’s in 30 minutes. This was just a quick stop. Any news for your father I can bring back?”
“No. Just tell him I’m doing fine.”
“You know, I think you are. Or you will be.”
Al wondered if Neville had any of the Sight; he’d said that so authoritatively. If so, Al had never heard about it. But it was nice to believe that he did.
***
He spent the next few afternoons in the forests, collecting samples for Neville and learning to love these strange, lush, silent places. Cathedrals of trees, he’d heard them called, and he did feel a hushed reverence that was almost religious. He stayed off the beaten track, avoiding both park rangers and the tourists who came by the busload to some of the groves. He flew, sometimes, and hiked other times, and the strenuousness of his days--for the topography was by no means flat--brought him a serenity that he’d forgot he could feel. He hadn’t slept so well in ages. And then it all changed.
He’d had an irksome morning figuring out how to post the parcel to Neville; for international delivery it had to be sent through Portkey cargo and then Owled. But there were forms to fill out and affidavits to sign and he was put in a room to speak with a customs official because of the trees’ protected status. Once it was on its way, finally, he strode to the other end of the terminal to the Apparition pad.
He groaned when he saw the queue for whatever pastry Gwyn had just pulled out of the oven, but went to wait. There was a folk music jam going on in the corner, as there sometimes was; Gwyn herself played the tin whistle and Al had seen her come out of the kitchen once to join in. Today it was just guitar, fiddle and a kind of lap drum that looked to be made of mottled skin. The singer was someone Al had seen in the cafe; she was small, with a cloud of black hair around her pale face. She was Muggle, undoubtedly, but wore a cape that wasn’t unlike Wizard cloaks; Al had noticed her silver cloak-pin with its intricate interlace pattern. She was singing something that was at once mournful and driving:
And once it fell upon a day
A cold day and a snell,
When we were from the hunting come,
That from my horse I fell,
The Queen of Fairies she caught me,
In yon green hill to dwell.
“She’s freakishly good, isn’t she,” said Gwyn, and Al started; he hadn’t even noticed he was at the head of the queue. “Tam Lin is one of my favourite ballads, and Aislin does it more hauntingly than anybody.” She handed him his tea and a roll that was still gently steaming.
He sat, inhaling the fragrance and feeling the tension drain out. He didn’t look around until he’d sipped from his funky, mismatched porcelain cup for a good five minutes. And when he did, he looked straight into the grey eyes of Scorpius Malfoy.
Part 2...