The flat was a mix of styles, warm upholsteries, utilitarian function, a little bit of Danish charm. But there were also the Eastern influences, rich and dark, books one might have found in an abandoned castle in a snowy wasteland. Bursts of color. Russian red. The most recent additions to her half-full shelves were a bronzy talisman and pair of tomes with gold detail, finds from her trips with Josephine. They were half obscured by the small Christmas tree— the only notable festive decor in the flat— whose fragrant pine was lightly coated with charmed snow.

Despite this, the place was warm, a surprisingly inviting refuge. It lent itself to a weekend collection of half-empty mugs, bare feet on whitewashed floor boards, slow-burning candles. Reprieve from the invisible burns of mind-weary magic.

Magdalena could use a break about now, in fact. But the words refused to pass her lips.

She pushed harder, willed a vision that was not her own to dance across her mind’s eyes. To barrel, more like it.

The headaches were becoming more familiar, but no less irksome than they’d been when she’d initially waded from the dry pages of theory to the murky shore of another's mind. And today’s target might have been a cold ocean, for all the visibility and mercy he showed; Magda’s determination to string up some sickly sweet childhood memory, even the most minor embarrassment, had been met with a wall as thick as Siberian snow.

But then that was why Magda had asked him, wasn’t it?

Bitter blue eyes narrowed at the obstruction— so pleasantly, vexingly masked with that face—

“Mudak,” she snapped. “You’re never this hard to get.”

As evidenced by the mess of blankets on her sofa, the half bottle of vodka on the table in front of it, the throw pillows that had been displaced in favor of Russian company.

Her wand hand came down in frustration (not defeat). Her grip loosened. She took a step closer. “I know your brothers have made an idiot of you before— I’ve seen it happen.” A loose interpretation. Not quite a lie. But not anything like she as looking for. She hadn't wanted to lay bare her cards, but a change in tactic was necessary. Wand still at her side, she took another step forward, gauging his expression.

Graduating hadn’t been everything Lyov had hoped for. With his knowledge gained from Durmstrang, as well as his connections, he was able to start off as a soldier. Most had to scrap their way as an associate for a few years. His plan was to continue to advance up the ranks: his eye was set on caporegime. From there, he hoped by the time he was in his mid twenties, he’d be an underboss. To one of the biggest wizarding Russian Mafia’s.

As part of his advancement, he was in London, doing some scouting. Not everything stayed in Russia, after all. Once he’d cleaned up a small mess, he’d stopped in to see how his favorite former Oberteil was doing. A little rough and tumble time later, and he was stretched out on the sofa, his own wand casually held in one hand while his other lifted a cigarette from his lips, smoke blowing out.

He laughed at her frustration. It was cute. It was too easy to get under her skin. His shoes, coat, and trousers littered her apartment floor. He scratched himself with the tip of the wand, shrugging absentmindedly as he looked around her space.

It was nicer than what he had, definitely. Not that he was much bothered with decor. A bed, bathroom, and small kitchen was all he needed. Thus, his studio in Moscow was perfect. All of it was well used. “My brothers?” Eyes narrowed as he considered it, a slight frown focusing on her before he sat up and leaned forward, taking another drag off the cigarette. Lyov let the smoke slowly seep out his nostrils as he flicked ash off the side of the couch, arm lazily leaning against it.

“You’re thinking too hard on it, Mags.” He smirked and lifted his wand, pointing it to her. “You have to empty yourself.” Which might have been the problem, after all. Too full, right now. As his gaze fell down her figure, he boldly shouted the Legilimency spell, hoping to catch her off guard.

The headaches were badges of honor. The exhaustion that seemed to settle in the bones... that was more frightening than one might give in to. He’d worked at this art for a few years, now. Lyov planned to master it before that promotion to underboss. If anything, that would help shoe him in.

His laughter might have been a comfort if it didn’t add to her annoyance over the wall in her way. Magda would not admit, in words, that she’d missed it— that it had been too long since she’d seen his layers discarded, allowed the smoke to settle in her hair (and now her furniture)— but it was certainly a dangerous thing when they had their wands out.

“Your younger, cuter brothers,” she lied easily. “I can see why you might want to block them from your mind. Your parents tried for a better model and got two.”

The worst part was that he probably knew she was lying, that she would have traded two of them for one of him, but it didn’t mean she couldn’t attempt to agitate him a little. Maybe it would be easier to get past his defenses. “Tell them I say hi when you see them at Christmas.”

All it took was assuming he was lazy, caught in a conversation, busy with the smoke.

It peeled away from her, the memory: Magdalena, aged thirteen. Barely into her third year, hair falling out of a loose braid. The dark corner of a broom cupboard, and a mouth far less enchanting than Lyov’s.

Watching him smoke, bare chested and gold clad on her sofa had no doubt distracted her, helped him to reach this far into her mind.

No, the person in the memory wasn’t anyone so easy on the eyes. Anselm Falkenrath, unmistakable even at the summit of puberty, leered conspiringly, his expression equal parts nervous (in that glassy way) and impressed with himself (in that teenage boy way). There was a stain of faded rose pink on his cheek, the corner of his mouth: evidence that damned the younger version of Magda in the scene.

Anselm, in his later years at Durmstrang, had been known as a sloppy kisser and always desperate for female attention. Though an Oberteil, and capable enough wizard, he was also an insufferable hanger-on, someone always lingering on the fringes of the groups he so desperately wanted to befriend.

Magda in the present parted lips. The unwitting expression was followed by a purposeful grit of teeth. And then her mind surged, the spell for an Occlumens’ defense burst from her wand tip, flew at him, an unseen force. It was not what she wanted, to depend upon Occlumency, but it was why they learned it first. He had forced it, with his easy slip of the Legilimency spell. Lyov, always dangling what she couldn’t have.

She caught herself, melted from a stony stance, and moved forward again, hovering over him, her brow knitted like a storm. Her wand tip rested against his cheek. “If you tell anyone…” She sank down to eye level, her body adding weight to his. Her wand trailed bare skin, lulled above his heart, which she’d might have questioned if she hadn’t heard it beat earlier, when they been enmeshed in a different position, minus a layer of gold watches.

But she let the wand fall, and she relaxed too, a leg repositioning itself, entitled, over his.

She took the cigarette from him, pulled at with lip and cheeks, and turned away to exhale. Soft gray slipped from her shoulder, just barely. “I’m sure yours was uglier,” she said of his first kiss. It had probably been some whore thrice his age. And then turned back and reached over his shoulder, tapping ash away. “Let me try again.” She was insistent, sober in her appeal. She could take his advice, empty herself.

“Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.” He ran his tongue along the inside of his lip, pushing it out slowly as he processed her words. She knew how to dig under his skin; those two were a tag team of innocent smiles and mischievous eyes. Aleksei and Stefan... were now in their last year at Durmstrang. As he was working, he didn’t have to see them very often over the summer. Even with two against one, they didn’t often come out on top.

Where he studied heavily in Spellworks, his younger brothers were both making their marks in the Intangible study. Where Lyov wanted to rise the ranks of the Mafia, they wanted to go on into politics. It was a different side of their family coin. It irritated him, if he were honest. “Why don’t you take a picture for them instead? I’m sure they’d prefer enjoying you, and not hearing you.”

They knew which buttons to push to get a reaction on the other. Invading her mind was a greater victory.

He saw the memory as if he were stepping into it, an unwelcome fly on the wall. He knew Mags at that age, but Lyov had other conquests in mind. Judging by the familiar classmate, so had she. The important thing, he’d learned, was to stay calm. If the one invading allowed personal feelings to slip in, then the bond was weak. Lyov almost laughed.

The counter spell knocked the wind out of him, pressing him back harshly against the sofa. Finally he caught his breath, and as it was let out, he blinked back into reality. Sometimes it took a moment to reacquaint oneself with what was real and what was not. Of course, the wand against his cheek was reminder enough.

Looking up at her, he finally smirked, his cheek bunching up under the pressure of the deadly wood. “What, and make a fool of you long after Durmstrang?” An eyebrow cocked in mockery. Lyov was aware that he felt jealousy underneath it all. That she would have chosen Falkenrath at any point in their education... He brushed her wand away as his smirk slipped into a frown.

The relinquishing of the cigarette was no concern to him. Lyov thought about her words. She probably was, not that he could remember who was his first.

His tongue wet his lips before he positioned himself better on the couch. “If you keep at this pace, you’re going to end up with a migraine.” But he didn’t say no. Pushing her off his lap, he slowly stood up and stretched, hiding a yawn behind his hand. “Come on, then. The easiest way into someones mind is when they least expect it.” But she didn’t want an easy challenge. She wanted to win. That fight... it was what drew him in time and again. “Tell me, did Anselm do everything you said? Did he... make you happy?” Now he did chuckle, eyes clouded as eyebrows bunched together, wand lightly gripped as he waited. "You sounded like you were having a good time, kitten."

The nicknames, spoken in what Magda took as an eye-rolly tone, were like a sweet song. Mostly because they proved what she already knew, that she could annoy him with mention of his adorable brothers. (Who were not so adorable as to hold Magdalena’s interest for very long— and whose faces were in disagreement with their nature.) She’d known them casually, a pair of little flirts, but most of her time at the Malchenoff home— over a holiday break— had been spent out of their viewing range. (Or so Magda had assumed.) And in school, she’d usually been occupied or more interested in their elder brother, often to her own vexation. She wouldn’t hesitate in teasing him about them in the same may she might be cautious to bring up his parents. She respected his mother, at least.

But Lyov’s sharp tongue wiped the smile from her face; lips pressed into a look of embitterment, then the corners of her mouth fell. The pouty frown seemed to be against her own determination, and Magda quickly ushered it away with scathing words of her own. Head held high, in the moments before spell. “Why would I waste words on them? They have a better use.” She smiled.

However short-lived it was.

She knew, despite the draining feeling of having her mind invaded, and the concentration of the person on the other end of the magic, that he took private merriment in the unwitting divulgence. (She didn’t need to be given any clues to know that.)

There was little triumph in watching her retaliatory power pin him to the sofa as Magda, too, was dragged out of the memory. However appealing to see him trapped, if only for the brusquest moment, she knew what he had seen.

“You’d find a way,” Magda murmured, pressing the wood a little more into that severely-cut cheek, which managed to arrange itself into a boyish bunch of amusement as quickly as its owner had invaded her mind. “I know you all still go out drinking and…” She’d leave it there. When she joined the group, they were always heavy on that activity, and Magda often kept a hand on what she wanted. Under the table. Lest it wander. But any rough filter that might exist in a classroom, under the eyes of a professor, was devastated by 40 percent alcohol. They lived to humiliate each other lovingly.

She didn’t mind the migraines, if she could manage to invade his mind at least once today. “We have a remedy for that,” she pointed out, as he discarded her onto a softer surface. She watched him stand, in all his gold and glory, studied him from a new vantage point through one more drag. As the smoke cleared, she decided his offer was sincere. Lyov liked to compete as much as she did. She could trust him there, at least.

But how could he least expect it if they were here practicing?

Magda’s eyes narrowed again at his words, teeth gritted prettily. But then her face relaxed, she raised her chin. “You’d be surprised,” she said calmly. Cigarette idling in one hand, she pushed up and faced him. “What some people would do to make me happy.”

They’d always had to try a lot harder than he had. Even the nickname had a smoothness to it that made it hard to remain angry with him.

She reached out and offered the cigarette back, eyes moving from his gaze to his lips. Magda could empty herself.  She let everything slip away as she continued to watch his mouth. And then she let go, too, of the reasons she found it so distracting, of the little pleasures and many vicious burns it had brought her.

Like a bee sting, he was real.

She said a spell, in her mind, and attempted to push calmly but determined into his mind and past those little surface stings and physical hungers.