1:39 pm
Donovan’s, first floor




Somewhere – in a bedroom, of a relatively spacious flat above a certain shop on Diagon Alley – a body stirs beneath a swell of blankets, hazily drifting between various states of unconsciousness. It’s not even two yet that it’s back there – a sparse five hours since, if you wanted to get specific – but regardless its owner is anyway, the entire length of him sprawled belly-down on the mattress, sheets twisted around his legs.

Usually Rick wasn’t one for sleeping in—at least, not since he was fifteen—but some things just couldn’t be helped the closer it was to a full moon. (It did things, okay. With the whole matter of furriness and howling and, you know, teeth, a temporary change in patterns was pretty much at the least of all his problems.) Plus, while even now he still wouldn’t say he was okay with that – not without feeling like a liar, anyway – it was still nice, he’d admit, considering how his day usually began at five.

In the morning.

Tonight, moonrise would start around three, and his evening wouldn’t end until the sun was well and truly up. As far as the werewolf is concerned, he gets a pass on this one.




Ten minutes later, Rick’s bliss comes to swift and brutal end. His bedroom door opening with a cheerful bang, someone strides noisily into the room.

At the foot of his bed, the sound of boots thudding against floorboards gets closer and closer, and then… stops.

“Oh my god,” he hears his own voice lament dramatically, the sound of clothes rustling and palms smacking against sides—of hands being thrown up and dropped again. Resignation – or was it exasperation? – never rang so clear. “You went back to bed. Of course you went back to bed. Why do I even-”

Aside from the telltale twitch between his brows, Rick doesn’t even bother glaring, much less open his eyes. Blindly, he gropes for a pillow and pulls it over his head; a small part of him hopes – albeit halfheartedly – that it’d make a difference, but he knows it won’t. “Get out, Ash,” he grunts, hoping against hope anyway.

A steel-toed boot roughly kicks the bedframe. “You get out,” is shot back with a heavily implied dose of bitch please. When Rick finally rouses himself up onto his elbows – face sleep-creased, hair flattened on one side ‘n all – he finds himself glaring at an identical reflection, baleful stare matched glower for glower. That same stare is a little different, though, with that sassy twist to the lips, that slight tilt of the head all attitude.

Even after four years of doing this – of bringing in a sister or cousin to take his place every full moon, the whole idea made possible by a steady supply of Polyjuice– it still never ceased to annoy him how every one of them, so far, had managed a credible portrayal of himself. It was useful, yes—like hell it wasn’t—but still damn annoying, seeing copies of himself be completely theirselves one moment and then him the next. It was weird, and more than a little off-putting; when he’s busy being smacked in the face with his lycanthropy, he isn’t in the mood of being reminded how easily, apparently, they seemed to have his character pegged.

For one thing, he likes to think he’s not that much of a mouthy shit, okay?

“What are you, twelve?” he snipes back, face contorting into a sneer. He hurls the pillow at her. “And what the hell are you wearing? Those aren’t my clothes.” Because they aren’t. In his entire twenty-eight years of living, not once has he worn some stupid T-shirt with some godforsaken math pun on it. Vans maybe, fine, but graphic tees, no. And he stopped wearing glasses years ago, what the hell. “Get that off my face,” he says flatly, jackknifing into a sitting position. His glare is thunderous beneath heavy brows. “Where the fuck did you find them?”

“Mom was keeping them,” his sister Ash replies, the gleeful look on her—his—face making Rick want to shove her. Out of his room, preferably. “Found them at the back of your closet half-transfigured into a hairbrush and a lens smashed to smithereens. Did you step on it or something?”

He gives her the dirtiest look on the planet. “I got rid of them.”

Ash tsks. “What a waste,” she hums, taking them off to peer at them. She turns them over in her hands. “You were pretty adorable.”

They’re not really much to look at, to be honest, just rectangular, thick-framed and black. But Rick hates them; at one point he might’ve been pretty fond of them, but he hadn’t known how stupid he’d actually looked in them. Now, they’re just a reminder of an era long gone—of one that ended sooner than it should have.

And just like that, the fight goes out of him.

Softly, Rick sighs. His shoulders slump. “Just take them off, Ash,” he says quietly, looking down at his lap.

Her grin immediately falters. “Hey, no, okay, fine,” she says, taking a step forward. “They’re off, see?” She waves them at him and, glancing down at them just once, tosses them onto the bed.

The smile he flashes her is small but grateful. Stretching over, he picks them up and swings his legs over the edge. He makes his way over to the dresser; a second later there’s a quiet click – a whirring sound – and the soft shhhh of wooden panels sliding against each other.

A small drawer appears.

Wordlessly, Rick drops them in. With another click, it seamlessly withdraws, disappearing into the dresser’s side as if it was never there.

He leans forward, rests his elbows on top of it. The surface is smooth, a dark polished mahogany, and one of the finer pieces he’d kept for himself. “I don’t suppose you’d give up the shirt, too?” he drawls, swinging his head ‘round to look at her, and tries for a grin.

It misses by a few inches, but it’s just enough to bring his sister’s back, which is about three different shades of cocky and a faint hue of relieved. “Not on your life,” Ash smirks, sassily folding her arms. “Now get up, you’ve still got an hour before we need your ass in the basement. I know you don’t have any appointments today-” He rarely did, if ever, and only when the commission was simple enough for his lookalike to bullshit credibly. “-but there’s a tool downstairs who keeps pushing on about his commission.”

“What,” his brows snap together. Biting down on a fervent ‘fuck-”, he yanks open another drawer, starts going through its contents in a rush. Shirt, he needs a shirt-

“Yep.” Ash stares down at her nails, tone distinctly – tellingly – bored. She only sounds like that when shit’s about to hit the fan, goddammit. “He was threatening to bring it to that bunch on North Side-” Rick stills, and starts again with a growl. “-when I left him with Phillip, so you might want to, y’know, hurry up there with the pants-”

He’s already pulling some on. “Have you seen my shirt?” he asks, yanking them up to his hips.

Ash abruptly looks up with an evil, evil grin. “Yeah, here,” she says, and starts… peeling off that god awful shirt, okay, what.

“What’re you- no. No.” Rick glares at her, like he’s trying to make her—which he is, can you blame him? “Ash, for the love of- keep that on.”

He catches it before it can hit his face. “It’s gonna look weird if you go down with a different shirt and pants,” she tells him smugly, hands on hips. Which left… her chest bare, ugh.

Sure, it was his own chest he was… currently not looking at now. But they and the others have been doing this for too long now not to know how Polyjuice worked. “At least put your bra back on,” he grits out, pinching the bridge of his nose. And, yes, he knows what he’s saying/asking, thanks.

She laughs at him, the shit. “Learn to say please, baby brother,” she says, going over to the closet to do so anyway. “Now, shoo, before Phillip or I tell your moron client he can go screw himself.”

Rick shoots her a withering stare, and yanks on the shirt with vengeance. The result is a twenty-eight year old werewolf stalking out of the room, hair mussed like an agitated porcupine’s behind.




If he’d had any other place to go… he would. Maybe. The life he’d made here wasn’t perfect, but it was his, and probably better than it should be; for one, his shop was doing pretty well, and at least he still had his family, which was a hell of lot more than he could say for other weres. But with the full moon pressing it made some things stand out more than others, and one of them was the awareness was that good or bad, this was all he had.

And sometimes, he wished it wasn’t.

Nothing of that shows on his face, though, as he makes his way to the counter, and as he draws closer Rick forces himself to smile.

---