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Post by Rister Graas S6 on Apr 25, 2022 15:52:43 GMT -5
"Exactly. It's light. And you have to survive until lunch. That's hours. You need something less-light. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It's morning, all the systems waking up," Jared wags a finger at Layla before offering her half of his buttered roll. "Roll? Eggs? Quiche? Eggs are light, but still in the range of acceptable, because they're delicious. And, I mean you can have fruit with it. After it."
"Good. Keep the salve," Jared responds with a tiny smile. He can afford to order a new pot. "Were you find with lifting the cold spell like I showed you? And if it hurts less, then that's perfect for you coming today. Are you meeting me in the common room or the entrance hall? At two thirty. Also this does not get you out of eating breakfast. You'll need the energy."
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Post by Layla Ellison on Apr 25, 2022 16:06:03 GMT -5
Layla stares at Jared bemusedly for a moment before reaching out to accept the roll, not really sure she has any other choice. He’s pushy, she realises and then frowns at him. Why? He can’t possibly want anything from her; he’s a fifth year so he knows loads more than she does and he obviously has friends so it’s not like he’s lonely. It doesn’t make sense, Layla thinks frustratedly, her frown deepening. He has to want something but she can’t figure out what it is and he doesn’t seem inclined to tell her, which just isn’t fair.
No. Layla scowls, reaching the limit of her patience for not knowing something. She can’t do it anymore. Jared’s relentless kindness is killing her because she doesn’t understand it. Maybe she had once been naive enough to think that kindness was free but she’s not that stupid little kid any longer. “Why are you being nice to me?” Layla demands fiercely, her voice low and hushed. “What do you want?”
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Post by Rister Graas S6 on Apr 25, 2022 16:22:38 GMT -5
Jared grins at Layla when she accepts a roll and turns his attention back to the table contemplating what to promote next. Which is why he doesn't quite notice the scowl directed his ways until the urgency in Layla's voice makes him glance over again.
It's... heartbreaking really that the kid's first question is why he's nice. "For you to eat a full breakfast. Eggs. Really, eggs are fantastic. Wouldn't say no to a cup of coffee, but the pots are all far," Jared lifts his arms in a gesture of surrender as the tiny point glares at him. "I have no grand plans or machinations. At the moment all I want is for you to eat breakfast and to meet me in the afternoon to come to the duelling-club-that's-not. No particular reasons. Maybe I just fancied the idea of taking you on as a student I suppose."
Jared pauses and waits for a second. "Now what are your feelings about cherry tomatoes? If you say you dislike them, I'll doubt your sanity and make you try one anyway, because they're great and maybe even if you disliked it before, you might now be old enough to like them. A human's taste can change fully over seven years you know."
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Post by Layla Ellison on Apr 25, 2022 16:43:46 GMT -5
Layla falters, chin tucked against her chest and shoulders hunched as she studies Jared with clear bewilderment. He’s serious, she decides uncertainly. He actually just wants to be nice. She just doesn’t understand why. She’s been here for seven months and no one else has gone out of their way to be nice to her. What makes Jared so different? “Why?” she asks again helplessly, not really expecting an answer.
“Cherry tomatoes are nice,” Layla offers tentatively. “They’re good raw but they’re better roasted.” Her mum had always roasted them with spices and some sort of sweet vinegar glaze. Layla doesn’t know the recipe but the house elves are happy to help her figure it out through trial and error. She had felt guilty asking them but they seem to enjoy the challenge and Layla misses those roasted tomatoes. She can taste the memory of warm Sunday mornings at the kitchen table whenever the house elves get close to matching the original recipe.
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Post by Rister Graas S6 on Apr 25, 2022 16:57:30 GMT -5
"Why not?" Jared asked back, glancing around the table and reaching for the bowl of cherry tomatoes, tossing three onto his own plate even as he holds the bowl out to Layla. "Roasted. Hmm. Not sure I've had roasted cherry tomatoes. Regular roasted ones - yes. And probably cherry tomatoes in a juice or something. I'll have to try them sometime."
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Post by Philip Garwin on Jun 22, 2022 16:10:13 GMT -5
Pip meets Natalia in sixth year. Well, for any definition of ‘meets’ that covers off someone he’s technically sort of known for years but never really interacted with. They’ve shared classes and a House since they were eleven but his social circle in school is pretty limited. He’s the openly half-blood Slytherin, which doesn’t exactly endear him to his housemates. He could be the bastard Cartier instead if he wanted, as he learnt in his third year, but Pip wasn’t - and still isn’t - really sure that’s much better. His mum ran away from her family for a reason, after all. It would have to take an equally compelling reason to get him to get back to the life she ran away from. So he stays the half-blood Slytherin who fights anyone who looks at him wrong and sneaks out for illegal duelling tournaments and only ever lets a handful of people close enough to really know him.
He’s never really paid any attention to her before, which isn’t really saying much because Pip makes a point of paying as little attention to most people as he can. He isn’t a great student but he’s not stupid either; he can imagine exactly how much worse his first year would have gone if not for Rister and his siblings closing rank around him. He would have been Layla, who still watches their classmates with wary eyes when one of her old bullies moves too fast or looks at her too long. She never once flicks that sideways gaze in Natalia’s direction though so all he knows about her is that she never tormented his best friend and so he doesn’t hate her on principle. It’s not much but it’s enough for them to work well on the group assignment that Flitwick pairs them up for.
“So,” Natalia grins at him across the library table as he looks at her for the first time. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin, slow smirk. He really shouldn’t be surprised by the slow flip of his heart in his chest, not when she looks like she stepped right out of the dreams he refuses to remember if he doesn’t look too closely. “It’s weird to see you without your two shadows. I was starting to think the three of you were joined at the hip.”
She’s sharp and snarky, Pip learns over the course of the year. Natalia - “ay, dios, Philip, just call me Talia already, I know you have a maximum limit of syllables you can say each day before you shut down and have to go be a recluse somewhere” - doesn’t suffer fools easily but has a soft spot for the younger kids that she tries to hide behind cool smiles and disinterested scowls. And she likes him in a way that makes him feel guilty because he doesn’t like her the same way. Well, for the most part. There are a couple of times when he wakes up hard with hazy memories of dreams that he swears don’t usually feature her face but that just makes him more confused and conflicted because he’s increasingly sure that he doesn’t like girls that way even though he wants to - he’s already the half-blood Slytherin; he doesn’t want to be the gay half-blood Slytherin and have to own up to the thoughts he keeps stamped far, far down in his subconscious.
***
They fall into bed a couple of times that summer. Pip isn’t proud of it but Layla is often busy with Jared, cramming as much into the summer weeks as they can before their final year of separation, and Leon is off on a family holiday for six weeks and, honestly, if there’s a choice between drinking himself into bed with Talia or being roped into babysitting Rafe then he’ll take the option that gets him out of the castle and into a facade of heteronormativity. Talia is soft and warm and he shouldn’t hate himself a little bit more every time he sinks his cock into her but he does. He’s not always drunk when they fall together that way but he’s never completely sober either. He’s not sure he could go through with it if he was. There’s only so far that his cock’s investment in dark hair-dark eyes-olive skin can take him before needing a bit of a helpful nudge from something that dulls his mind enough to overlook the differences between what Natalia is and what he hates that he secretly wants her to be.
It stops in late August, when he forgets to heal the hickeys on his neck one morning and rolls straight out of the hotel bed Talia has rented for them so he can get back to the castle. They don’t actually need him to work there anymore than they did when he was eleven but Pip likes the horses and he’s struck up an easy friendship with the stablehands over the years so he carries on showing up anyway. It’s never been an issue before but he’s never forgotten to erase the evidence before either and his heart sinks the moment Layla’s sharp eyes flick over to him one too many times before she raises an eyebrow at him curiously. He slips away quietly to hide the marks but the damage is already done and they both know it.
“Are you going to tell me who they are?” Layla asks later, when it’s just the two of them stretched out under one of the large trees. Her tone is curious but not pushy and she shrugs easily when Pip shakes his head, unbothered and unoffended by his reticence. The push and pull between them has always been this simple; Layla understands like no one else he’s met what it is to be taken in by this family and know that they owe a debt that can’t be repaid. Their stories have been playing out very differently ever since Layla and Jared got together but their roots are still the same. They’re still the two Graas strays picked up by dark-haired boys with good intentions.
“It’s nothing important,” Pip answers eventually, sun-warm and almost sleepy as they finish off the last of the raspberries they’ve been splitting between them. “It’s just…” he trails off with a sigh, shoving himself up on one elbow as he rakes a hand through his hair. Layla hums quietly as she pushes herself up next to him, encouraging without pushing, and Pip can’t help his bark of laughter because he’d swear she learnt that exact noise from Rister. “I never take the easiest path, do I? I always make the wrong choices and fuck it all up. I can’t ever just be normal.”
“I will actually drown you in the pond if you ever say something that stupid again,” Layla threatens as she bounces the last raspberry off his forehead. It’s really not fair that he’s actually a little cowed by someone almost a foot shorter than him whose hair is practically white-blonde after a hot Italian summer - she looks like some cute, benevolent fairytale creature who lives in a flower, for god’s sake - but he’s seen her take down countless opponents over the years. She’s quick and vicious and only idiots aren’t even a little bit concerned when she has that look on her face. “Yeah, you make bad choices. We all do. Remember the centaur thing? Not my finest moment. Or Leon, with the asphodel? We’re seventeen; we’re allowed to be a bit stupid. Nothing about you is weird or abnormal,” she promises, a grin tugging at her mouth when Pip glances over at her. “Except your face. Obviously. How’d you manage to get someone to kiss you when you have such a weird face?”
Pip laughs, kicking gently at Layla’s leg. “Fuck you,” he says fondly, something in him settling. She knows and he knows she knows. Not who he’s been sleeping with or even necessarily that he has been sleeping with someone but that it’s a girl and he isn’t sure he wants it to be. She’s known for a while, he figures. Layla always knows more than she lets on. “At least I’m more interesting than breakfast foods. Or are we pretending your grand plan to figure out if Jared liked you better than eggs never happened?”
***
He’s two months shy of his 18th birthday when Talia slips a note to him during class. Leon’s the one to twitch a curious eyebrow at him this time but he rolls his eyes and shakes his head wryly when Pip scoffs and shoves the folded parchment in the back of his textbook without ever reading it.
“Secret admirer?” Leon mutters with a low snicker, jostling him playfully. “You could do worse if you want a girlfriend for a bit. Pretty girl, good family. My parents considered her for me once, a couple of years ago.”
“Sounds like she had a lucky escape,” Pip hisses back, and immediately forgets about both the unread note and the girl who had written it when the professor turns around to exasperatedly assign them both detention for disturbing class.
He means to follow up with Natalia, he really does. At least, that’s what he tells himself when her fingers hook in the back of his shirt collar to tug him aside when he’s walking back to his dorm from the Ravenclaw common room. He would have remembered, Pip tells himself. He would have. Eventually.
“We have to talk,” Talia says flatly, casting an extensive series of locking and anti-eavesdropping charms before jamming her wand back in its holster and turning to him, openly unimpressed with the confusion clearly written across Pip’s face. “You’ve been ignoring me since school started. And normally I wouldn’t care - it’s not like we could ever have been anything serious, so ultimately you were just a way to pass time. As much as I do like you, let’s be honest: someone from my kind of family couldn’t get serious about someone like you. It can’t happen. I’d be disowned. But…” she trails off with something that almost sounds like a sob, except that Pip has never seen Talia ever get really emotional before. It simply doesn’t happen. She’s not the type.
“What’s going on?” Pip asks quietly, suddenly apprehensive as he steps back. He has pretty good instincts for the most part and right now the hairs at the back of his neck are prickling like someone is about to hex him from behind. “Talia? Has something happened? Did your family find out about last summer and get mad at you?”
“Did they find out,” Natalia echoes with a quiet, hollow laugh. “No. No one knows. But they’re going to, really soon. I can’t hide it forever, not by myself.”
Her hands shake as she slides her rings off and Pip frowns as each one clinks together on the desk because something seems different about her with each piece of jewellery that comes off - her eyes are reddened, her face is pale and gaunt, there are dark circles under her eyes that weren’t there before and…Pip stumbles backwards, his heart sinking as his eyes drop to Natalia’s hand against her stomach, which suddenly isn’t quite so flat anymore. He isn’t stupid. He knows what pregnancy looks like. He’s an uncle. And, apparently, a father.
“Like I said,” Talia murmurs, dark eyes luminous with unshed tears. “We need to talk.”
***
By the time Pip makes a decision, he hates Natalia as much for who she isn’t as for the choices she’s made. Is still making. He isn’t ready to be a parent, he knows that. He can’t blame her for not being ready either. But he isn’t sure he’ll ever forgive her for the harsh words she hurls at him when he decides he wants the kids. Pip has far too much pride, he knows that, but it hurts far more than just his proud exterior to have the girl he probably could have loved in a different life - one where he isn’t so reluctantly self-aware, where he hasn’t spent years learning what love looks like from watching one of his best friends fall in love and be loved in return - highlight everything that’s wrong with him and use it as a weapon to tear him to shreds. That fight ends with him fleeing back to the safety of his room at the castle, one cheek burning red from Natalia’s palm and a small bleeding nick at his eyebrow that drips a slow trail down past the corner of his eye.
He goes to his mum’s family a few days later to take the name and the legacy she had left behind decades ago because he can suddenly see the future with sickening clarity and he doesn’t want that life for his boys. He can’t. They’re made of two Slytherins, two selfish and thoughtless teenagers who couldn’t even manage proper contraception when it mattered, and they’ll be raised by a boy who wasn’t even really sure he wanted them until it was almost too late. They’re destined for Slytherin because he doesn’t know how to be anything else so he doesn’t know how to raise them to be anything else. And Slytherin is hard for kids who don’t have a pureblood name. They’re going to need more than he can give them and he’ll sell his soul for them if he has to because they never asked for any of this mess. They didn’t ask for a useless dad and a mother who doesn’t want them. Pip Garwin can’t give three tiny, helpless triplets a future but Philip Cartier can. All it costs him is some blood and pride and the stabbing pain in his chest at the expression on his dad’s face when he has to admit what he’s done.
Pip has paid more for less but he still bursts into quiet, shuddering sobs when he collapses into bed that night. Leon curls a silently sympathetic hand around his ankle before tugging his shoes off while Layla strokes a hand through his hair and lets him pretend they can’t hear him falling apart. Putting him back together is tomorrow’s problem; tonight he gets to wallow and break and feel the magnitude of the choices he’s made.
***
His grandmother smooths a soft, loving hand over his dark hair when he’s finished swearing all the oaths that will tie him to the Cartier family. There are so many of them that it seems to drag on for hours and the Cartiers are rooted in blood magic, darker and heavier than anything taught at Hogwarts, so he has to stand there with blood dripping down his fingers the whole time, eyes flat and hard against the sharp burn of the deep cut carved into his forearm. For his boys, Pip reminds himself as he grows lightheaded and dizzy. For his boys. They need this. It doesn’t matter that it has to happen before they’re born to make sure they can take the Cartier name or that he’ll graduate as a Cartier despite sitting under the Hat as a Garwin or that he has an exam tomorrow morning. None of that matters.
“You did so well, darling boy,” his grandmother coos as she tips a potion over his wound that sizzles and smokes as it pulls the edges together. “You’re definitely my Charisse’s son. She was always so tough too. I always thought she’d do so well with the family business, until that awful mess when she left us. Such a waste,” she tuts. “Six children. So much potential. At least one of you would have been perfectly suited to lead the family. But none of that matters now. You’re back now. You and those sweet, perfect boys of yours. They’ll be our future, Philip, just as you should have been. My great-grandsons, the true future of our family. Things will be just as they always should have been.”
“I still need that oath in return,” Pip reminds her sharply, too tired and hurt to mind his tone. “You don’t get to use me or my kids as a way to get to the Graas family. Not ever. You don’t ask me questions about them or ask me to do you any favours. Nothing. You want something from them, fine. But leave us out of it. I was theirs long before I was yours.”
“And yet we’re the ones giving you our name and our protection,” Benoit drawls darkly as he steps into the room, Cartier Head ring bright on his hand. “It seems to me like you’re in no position to be making demands, cousin. You don’t speak our language, you don’t know our ways. You don’t bring anything to us but some bastards and your mother’s shame. But you’ll get your oath. And then one day I’ll figure out which one of them it is you’re so desperate to protect,” he murmurs, his smirk turning cruel in a way that makes Pip’s fingers twitch with the desire to punch the smugness right out of his eyes. “What is it, cousin? Did you fall in love with one of them and get told you’re not good enough? Perfectly true but also hard to believe. Their Heir married your sister, didn’t he? No name, no money, nothing worth having. Even you couldn’t be a worse prospect. So no, it can’t possibly be that. If the Heir will stoop so low then they could have found someone willing to marry you. Or was it just that none of them wanted you? I can understand why. You have three little examples of your incredible stupidity that will be following you for the rest of your life. My poor bastard cousin and his bastard children. No wonder no one wants you.”
***
“She made you swear the oaths the night before your NEWTs started? Crazy old bitch,” one of his cousins comments with a snort. Marcel is pushing forty, already greying, and so flippantly disrespectful that Pip is sometimes surprised he gets away with half the things he says. He’s also the one in charge of making sure that Pip - Philip, he has to be Philip now, Pip isn’t an appropriate name for a Cartier - doesn’t embarrass the family on the rare occasions he has to attend some social event or other.
“We all know she never got over your mum leaving. Her precious handpicked successor running off with a muggle. I’m pretty sure she refuses to die until she can make sure that Benoit hands over the Head ring to one of her grandkids. Or great-grandkids. Family rumour says she went mental when he stole it after her husband died - that scar on his face? Didn’t come from a duel gone wrong, no matter what he tells people,” Marcel confides, dark eyes gleaming with cruel glee. “Everyone knows Benoit wasn’t in line. He’s a bad Head but he’s sneaky and he’s careful. No one’s getting him out of the way anytime soon. And trust me, plenty of people have tried.”
***
“There are potions and spells, you know,” Marcel tells him one afternoon, quiet and almost sympathetic as he glances over at Pip. “I can see it in you. But you don’t have to feel this way forever. Whoever she is, it’s not worth it. One of the perks of being a Cartier - we have ways of blocking people out of our hearts so we don’t have to feel it anymore. You may not have a cuff but you have our name and our blood and our crest. You’re one of us and that gives you the right to use our resources, kid.”
That’s tempting, Pip has to admit. Not necessarily for quite the reasons his cousin is thinking but still. Tempting. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin. He’s so done with wanting the impossible. He’s nineteen now and he has to face the truth that he clearly isn’t supposed to have the type of love that other people do. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way. And it’s not like people are queueing up to date the constantly tired, surly young man with three toddlers and no time or energy to do much more than shove a hand through his hair each morning as he blearily wriggles an old pair of jeans over his hips and yanks a t-shirt over his head before dropping the boys off with whoever has volunteered to look after them that day on his way to work. He’s not a catch. He wasn’t even before he became a teenage father living off the charity of his family and friends.
“What does it involve?” Pip asks after a moment, not at all comforted by the slow grin spreading over his cousin’s face. The Cartiers are all sharp and dangerous, he’s learning, like sharks always ready to sniff out blood in the water. Marcel is one of the nicer ones, less inclined to dislike Pip solely because of who his parents are and genuinely fond of the triplets, but Pip is still wary of him. They’re family by blood but friends only in the loosest sense.
“Bit of magic, is all,” Marcel answers with a shrug and a sharp smirk before his expression turns more somber. “It hurts,” the older man says gently. “I won’t lie. You’re basically cutting out part of your heart, metaphorically speaking. There are a couple of rituals that stop you from ever falling in love again but they’re harsh and drastic. You’re too young for those; there’s still hope for you. But there’s one that a lot of us use, a Cartier family secret to make life a bit easier when we fall for the wrong person. We do a lot of arranged marriages and that’s a lot easier when we can enter into that without already being in love with someone else. It hurts but it’s worth it. It’s better than wanting what you can’t have, whatever the reason. Just…just make sure that whoever it is, you really can’t have her,” he advises with a sigh, melancholy flickering over his face as he glances down into the depths of his mug. “Magic is easily done, not so easily undone. There are always ways but it’s harder to put something back together than to tear it up. Once you brick up the way you feel for someone, that wall isn’t going to want to come back down again. You can sway a heart once but it isn’t going to be quite so malleable the next time.”
Pip rubs a thumb along the handle of his coffee mug contemplatively. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin. Cutting out that part of him and killing it once and for all doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world, honestly. It doesn’t invade his dreams or his thoughts the way it once did - he never dreams anymore, not like that - but he can still feel it tucked away in his heart like a secret. He sometimes thinks he’ll die with it still there, never spoken and never nurtured but stubbornly eternal. “Can you get the details for me?” Pip asks eventually, his hushed voice breaking the silence that’s settled around them. “It doesn’t hurt to consider the options, whether I do it or not.”
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