16 December 2011
Friday night at 8pm. A Starbuck's in central London

It was offensive to Figaro that he should be bored on a Friday night. The indignity to the bright youth was compounded by the discomfort of being left on his own with his brain. Soon it would be fully Christmas when the Hogwarts Express arrived at King’s Cross and everyone would be obliged with family things.

He tapped the little glowing screen.

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:11pm
figure
figure
It’s Figaro

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:12pm
Fig?? What? How? Really? How? You have a mobile? Oh you could be borrowing someone’s
     Fauna is typing
But who?
Abby? Sasha?
… Anton? Is it Anton?

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:15pm
Sasha bought it for me.
I didn’t have a way to charge it.

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:15pm
Um wow. Um ok cool! I never thought you’d say ‘charge it’ lol
laughing out loud

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:18pm
Isn’t that what its called?
what?
oh
I’m Starbucks.

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:20pm
I
shit hold on
You are at starbucks?
er which one? There are lots around here

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:22pm
to charge

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:23pm
oh!
should I meet you there? Or do you want to come over? Or we can keep texting?

Ten minutes pass.

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:34pm
is rain there?
rain
RAINE
why does it do that

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:35pm
technology. It thinks it knows better. No, Raine is not here. She doesn’t live here.

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:37pm
I thought she lived with you. who lives with you?

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:39pm
Penny, Grace, Theatre, fate etc
THETA, FAYETTES, etc
they are out right now, I took a nap and woke up a little while ago

16 Dec 2011 @ 08:42pm
ok I will come over


Ten minutes later, Figaro had rung the bell of Radford Estate and was leaning against the door frame. The glow of the screen of his twice-dropped iPhone 4S lit his face from below. Now that he had a place to be, he'd cheered a tick from his sullen haunting of the Starbucks. Warmer yet, though, were the two bright red Venti's he was able to marshall in his free hand.

Fig's text had woken her at the right time. Any longer and Fauna might have stayed asleep on the couch, and woken to her flatmates coming in from a night out, and then hated herself the next day as she'd tried to adjust her sleep schedule. Fig's text had made her laugh for the first time that day, too. Though Greer's trial had gone better than anyone could have hoped for, Fauna would never forget the sight of Greer's parents in tears as they realized they'd lost the chance to raise their children. It had been an extremely emotional day at the end of an emotional week.

She took a few minutes to brush her teeth and to throw on an oversized turtleneck sporting Hufflepuff yellow and black stripes. She kept on the same faded leggings she'd been wearing because it was that kind of week.

At the doorbell, Fauna hurried down the stairs and threw open the door before the portrait of Madam Radford could start shouting.

"Good evening to the sulky young man with one of those no-good gadgets and two of those no-good paper cups," the portrait sniffed behind her.

Ignoring her, Fauna started to smile at Fig, and then widened her eyes at the sight of the two large - venti sized! - coffees he carried. Thank Merlin for Fig! She hadn't even said anything and he'd brought one for her!

"Is one of those a cinnamon latte?" She said hopefully, stepping out into the rainy porch in her cupcake slippers and giving him a hug. A longer-than-usual hug. She swallowed, not expecting to feel so emotional at the sight of one of her closest and oldest friends, but as she stepped back she had her expression under control again and focused on the coffee, holding her hand out to take one.

"We have snacks and things in the kitchen," Fauna announced as she led the way inside, past the portrait of Madam Radford inspecting Figaro in the foyer. "Uh, we have drinks too. Feel free to move aside the nest," she gestured to the throw blankets heaped on the couch, and the collection of half-full tea mugs that her flatmates had foisted on her.

She stopped to sip at the warm coffee and to stare with unabashed curiosity at the phone in his hand.

Fauna's extra hug didn't go unnoticed and Figaro (perhaps selfishly) wondered if she'd heard what had happened over the full moon, with Kurby, with Moira. He returned the affection just the same, relieved to be around somebody easy. Fauna looked a bit worn down or maybe it was because she'd just woken up.

Cinnamon latte? "Uh, no. Just cream." He didn't know how she took it and it seemed a safe bet. Also, Starbucks had a thousand options and he'd frozen up. At least he hadn't Blown The Lid Off This Whole Thing trying to pay in sickles.

He followed her in past the snarking old portrait and he frowned. He wasn't sulky. He smoothed out his hair. Fig was dressed down as well; loose grey sweats, band shirt, socks with football slides, and his warmer coat.

Figaro had forgotten what a grand house was Radford estate. He might be uncomfortable in the relative extravagance, but to be fair, like, six people lived here. The rich rooms sprawled filled with the trappings of history as well as the residents' personals. It was a stark contrast to how Fig was living - solitary and simple.  What he didn't have that he envied was a fully stocked kitchen. He made a bee-line.

"You alright then? Been ages," he asked as he started to snoop in cabinets.

Fauna looked at her no-cinnamon coffee and followed Fig into the kitchen, where she removed the lid of the container and added a dash of sugar and cinnamon. She sipped at it, letting her hands feel the warmth. It was the little things.

She collected a few of the tea cups and chocolate wrappers and took them to the kitchen as well, washing up with a flick of her wand. As Fig searched, she took pity on him and unlocked the snack stash cabinet. They had the usual crackers and biscuits, but also candy from Honeydukes and Grace's healthier fruit snacks. Dion had once tried to label the shelves with their names, but Fauna and Brett had doodled over the labels. Fauna had drawn smiley faces and Brett had drawn, well, less appropriate appendages. Fig would see.

"I'm ok," Fauna shrugged one shoulder. To quote Abby, she was alive! You're alive, she'd hugged her in the office a few days ago and had almost made Fauna cry in front of all the Aurors.

"It's been a shit week," she went on, not sounding too concerned, only picking at the edges of her sleeves.

"You?" She stopped fidgeting. "Um, what happened with Sasha getting you a mobile?" She couldn't help but ask, a smile tugging on her face.

In another mood, Figaro might have been more polite and made sure that what he was pulling off the shelves was indeed alright for him to eat, but he was a bit spent on that. He found some whiskey and dropped a plug or two into his coffee, and Dax's shelf had Weasley's Cheesy Puffs, savory crunchy cheese cracker things that created an orange puff of smoke when you ate them. They were disgusting and Figaro loved them. That and a jar of olives.

"Shit week," Figaro concurred with a big snack-happy smile.

Part of him wanted to just dump the entire ordeal onto Fauna, but a much more weary part of him wanted to forget about it all for two consecutive seconds. Sweet Fauna for finding a benign topic.

"I was in Cambridge for a work thing," Fig explained and took his ill-gotten haul to the living room. "Met up with Sasha and went to the muggle shops. Honestly, think it was his plan all along. To buy me a phone and get me all proper modern muggle. Wait. Aw shit."

Figaro had to go back and fetch the iPhone from the kitchen.

"I cannot keep track of this thing. Lost it for a month right after I got it."

"Ok, Fig, you're sitting in the chair of shame with those things," Fauna pointed at the armchair next to the couch that had a stain on the side. Either the dog or Dax usually sat there, which should tell Fig a few things. Fauna settled in the middle of the couch with her venti coffee and a handful of chocolate-covered almonds, the perfect distance from any clouds of orange or olive breath.

There was a time when any mention of Sasha would have made Fauna roll her eyes and clam up, but she smiled a bit, remembering their text conversation and their plans to include Anton in a game of 'capture the hat'. Which Fig would be invited to as well.

"That's nice of him. Well, it's not like he can get owls easily while he's at Cambridge, so it makes sense that he'd want a way to reach his, er, less properly muggly friends, too."

If Fig wouldn't keep losing his phone. Fauna watched in amusement as he got up to fetch it, about to make a comment about how she'd assumed he was one of her stepbrother's goofy friends last month, but her eyebrows raised in surprise when she saw it was an iPhone.

"What did you think of the shops? Do you have a bunch of apps and things already on there?"

Fauna leaned forward and made a grabby motion with her hand.

Chair of shame. Sounded about right, Figaro thought sullenly. Fig had a seat without comment and tore open the Cheesy Puffs. Fauna's justification of Sasha just buying him a mobile made sense. Fig hadn't really thought of what it was like for Sasha leaving London and immersing himself in the muggle world again; he'd always seemed to comfortable switching back and forth but maybe after years at Hogwarts things were different.

"Yea, it was pretty nice."

He popped a Cheezy Puff into his mouth. First bite down and he felt a puff of smoke erupt. He sat back and blew an orange smoke ring - he and Frank had spent hours on this trick. It floated out and over the coffee table before dissipating.

"What did you think of the shops?"

"Shiny," was Fig's one-word reply. It had been sensory overload. Brightly lit signs, elaborate displays with flashy packaging. The only shop that really reminded him of Diagon Alley was the one selling incense, colored gemstones, and tie-dye wall hangings.

"What's an app," he asked then, indifferent, then tossed her his phone.

Another Puff another smoke ring. "Work good? Arrest anybody lately?"

Fauna looked up at his short answers, searching his face. She glanced in the direction of the portrait in the hall, remembering that Madam Radford had announced him as 'sulky'. Trust the portrait to pick up on something in two seconds that Fauna was just now putting together. She wondered just how shitty his week had been.

"It's, um, short for application," she caught the phone. "It does a specific thing, like Facebook and Skype and texting and - holy shit!"

She straightened on the couch, blinking at the phone.

"This is the latest model? Holy shit, Fig! That's hundreds of - I mean," she blushed, hoping she hadn't just ruined Sasha's present. "It's, uh... you might want to keep better track of uh, this."

She grinned, then hopped up from her seat.

"I have to show you something. Work is work, but I got a day off, and look what I did."

She beckoned him to the closet just off the hall. Fauna stood in front of the door with an ultra serious look on her face.

"Magic zone," she gestured around them at the living room and the faint traces of orange smoke in the air. "Magic is a wonderful thing, but it hates technology. And applications. It makes screens flicker and phones short out. You know?"

Fauna nudged his arm. Did he know?

She opened the closet door and gestured inside. "No-magic zone! No spells, no casting, no enchantments here."

Except for the burn marks on the floor where she'd tried to recreate the net trap and failed and failed and failed again, finally settling on more basic wards.

Fauna's old phone from 2009 sat on a little shelf and she was sure Grace's was somewhere. Inside, she'd brought in a few extra chairs from the kitchen and strung up battery-operated lights and had a cute little portable radio and had even put up a wallpaper with rotary phones floating in a gray sky.

Her flatmates had not said one word. They'd removed their coats and shoes and watched her, worriedly, as she'd struggled with pasting up wallpaper the muggle way.

"Try it! Try to cast something."

Figaro lifted his eyebrows as Fauna had a mini-freakout over his phone. She advised him to keep better track of it and he stopped himself from rolling his eyes. It was easy to guess the phone was expensive and he'd been a bit frantic that he'd lost it, once he'd realized he'd lost it. But he didn't need Fauna telling him so. He forced himself to return her grin. She was just trying to be helpful.

But Fauna had something to show him? She seemed so jazzed about it, he couldn't help but leave the food and follow her around the corner to a ... closet? He looked in and rather marveled at it. Fauna had outdone herself. The room was peak Fauna.

"Ha, nice," he said. But when Fauna called it a No-Magic zone, Figaro stepped back and looked at her like she'd grown another head. But she seemed so excited and proud of the effort that he shrugged and stepped just into the doorway. He drew his wand and cast a wix's handiest spell.

"Lumos!"

Nothing. "Ah!" he hopped out and visibly shivered like a ghost had walked through him.

"That's so weird, oh balls, it seems so wrong!" he said with a cringy grin.

There hadn't even been a fizzle of a failed cast. "How'd you even do that?"

Oh good, it still worked. She nodded, holding back a laugh at his reaction.

"Well," Fauna said excitedly, with a little hair toss over her shoulder. "At first I was trying to uh, catch the magic. In a net around the room. And it wouldn't work, I couldn't figure it out. Then I thought, well shit, even if it worked, the magic would rebound off the net and um, hurt someone. Which is not good. It's a shitty move and I couldn't figure it out," she glanced at the burn marks on the floor. Her face fell for a second.

"Um so! Then I thought, here I am standing in a magical house. It already has magic, the walls are full of it. I don't need to catch the magic, I just need to tell the magic to stop here," she made a line with her hand at the door. "It's like when you want to hide a magical house from muggles. What do you do? You set up illusions and enchantments and mask the magic. Turns out you can take it a step further and tell the magic not to cross a line. Theta figured it out, really. I had to draw a bunch of wards and glyphs on the walls. But it worked! It works!"

She smiled again.

"I would show you, but putting up the wallpaper was a beast," she said seriously. "The most annoying part, Fig. Life lesson - never try to wallpaper without magic."

"Wallpaper first," he said with a shrug. Fig was teasing a little but he was really impressed. Fauna, and Theta apparently, and figured out this bizarre little hell closet just so they could use phones. He stepped halfway in again to tap one finger on the kitchy wallpaper. He'd been a bit shit at Runes in school, but Fauna and Theta had pulled off an actual practical use for them.

"Well, that's brilliant, Faun," he said and started to wander back towards the living room. He lit his wand and twirled it between his fingers in that fidgety way so many young magical kids learned do to their first months with the implements.

He dropped back into the chair, unable to be truly thrilled about the innovation. It felt difficult to be excited by mobile phones when, you know, people were dead, he'd been a little involved with it. And Kurby had left him with orders to not speak of it. Not even Fauna.

She wrinkled her nose and smiled in that way she did whenever Fig teased her. It felt strange though, to be the one blathering on and filling the air with words while Fig fidgeted and took his seat again.

Fauna collected her coffee from the table and scooted to the end of the couch, closer to Fig's chair, putting herself in cheese-smoke range. Good thing Fig ranked higher than cheese on their collaborative list of priorities.

What wasn't on the list? Phones. But he'd found his phone and found the time to charge it at Starbucks. Like her, he wasn't out at the pubs tonight.

"You seem a little down. Are you ok?" Fauna asked simply, glancing at him as she sipped at her coffee.

"Ah, sorry," he said. A sigh came out of his nose orange, like the fiery breath of a moping dragon on his hoard. The cheesy smoke dissipated in curls.

He had to sink down further in the chair and blink a long one to stop himself just blurting it all out. But that was always the point, wasn't it, everyone in this entire world keeping and breaking secrets, and nobody able to pin down any consistency in accountability and here he was with no idea what he was supposed to be doing. Either he went to sleep for the next forty years or he had to process it. There wasn't some in between where he could just patiently stew. Kurby could demand he shut his mouth and Figaro was meant to just merrily skip about biting his tongue, but the one time he asked Moira to leave him out of it, she's a big hero and he's the arsehole?

Figaro grumbled and rubbed his hair.

"Yeah, no, I mean, everythings currently in a pile but I can't talk about it and I'm going to explode if I don't get heavily drunk."

He held up a finger. "But I will definitely talk about it if I get buzzed. So. You know. I'm shit company tonight."

Figaro was never bad company. He'd concede to obnoxious or exhausting, but he was always good company.

Her brow furrowed in concern and slight confusion. He didn't need to apologize. When Fig slid further into his chair and said he couldn't talk about it but likely would if he got buzzed (but couldn't resist getting buzzed), in some way, it made sense. Fauna nodded. That felt like her life everyday. She couldn't talk about the important things that affected her because everything was top-secret. If she talked about it to friends in the office, there was the chance that they might not respect her or they'd spend time worrying about her when they needed to be working. Adding alcohol made her relax, yet increased the chances of talking. She got it. It was hard.

But Fig was a happy-go-lucky coffee fetcher, he'd said it himself many times. What could cause him to clam up? Family? She hoped it wasn't anything to do with his father, recently released from Azkaban.

"It's just me," she lifted one shoulder, sympathy flitting over her face. He didn't have to be good company. "You've seen me freak out and kick at things and curse people and burst into tears, you know?"

Mostly in the common room, but Fauna had a feeling those days weren't over. "You can't erase or forget that. I'd kind of like you to, but you can't."

The corners of her mouth tugged into a rueful smile. Thank Merlin he'd stopped her from cursing her boss at Spellpunk the last time! Had that really happened in November? It felt like ages ago.

She glanced around the living room, leaning forward as if to stand up. "Um, I think the twins have a chess set around here somewhere. If you want to play a few rounds?"

Fauna made a slight face at him. Wizarding chess! The bane of her existence, when she tried to save every pawn and Fig just laughed and lopped their heads off.

Figaro had to nod and smile ruefully. He and Fauna really had allowed each other to witness their utter disasters, which is more than he could say for any of the rest of his friends. It followed that if they could survive that, they could survive each others' moping bad company without judgement. That was something positive to bring forward in a week like this.

At the suggestion of wizard chess, Figaro immediately clapped his hands once and loudly and got to his feet.

"Yes," he said firmly. Yes, this would distract him enough, keep his mind of his problems and away from his preferred unhealthy coping mechanism. In a touch of reckless enthusiasm he got his wand and commanded, "Accio chess set."

Momentarily, there came a rattling from a drawer. Business-like, Figaro cleared more space on the coffee table and pulled the Dax Chair of Shame closer. The chess pieces milled about, taking their time to get set - Fig helped them along.

"You heard from anyone in awhile," he asked, starting by moving out one of his horses. Other than Moira, it'd been a few weeks since he'd seen everyone. Most of them at the birthday party.[1] But Fauna a bit more recently at Spellpunk, and of course, meeting Sash in Cambridge.

1.	Nov 11 - Party for Mixed Company