BACK TO SUMMER 2008

London. Just past noon.

Packing didn’t take long, though he occupied himself a while with what to wear. What in Merlin’s name were Yavin and Laidie saying out there anyway?

He left the bedroom door open while he stacked books and homework at the bottom of his leather duffel. Adelaide was talking but he couldn’t make out her words. Rolled up clothes went over the books before the bag was zipped up.

Virgil dithered a second - nervous about going back to the living room. Only, if he stayed here he would have to sit in his thoughts. And he couldn’t. So. He grabbed his violin case.

            “I told you, I didn’t make him do anything!” he heard Adelaide’s rising voice as he stepped out. “Where the hell do you get off on your high horse anyway? He’s not made of glass, he can make his own decisions.”

She stopped when she saw him. Virgil looked away, embarrassed.

          “Do you have muggle money on you?” Yavin got up, reaching into his pocket.
“Um, some, yes,” he answered but meekly accepted the twenty pound note anyway.
            “There’s a cafe around the corner, your usual spot,” his mentor continued calmly, resuming his seat. “Have a coffee and something to bite, I’ll be down in thirty minutes.”

Virgil felt Adelaide’s eyes on his face, flushed red in shame. Don’t look at her. Keep moving. Virgil readjusted the strap of his bag and dipped his head in their direction.

“I’ll see you,” he said as he left, uncertain of who he was speaking to. Only certain that he had to leave, now, or face something unbearable.

The apartment door shut. Yavin sighed and leaned back in the stiff white leather armchair.

“I’m the first person to admit, even objectively, he’s mature for his age…” he trailed off, letting that hang in the air like a barrier between himself and the incestuous affair still in its infancy. What he’d seen in Adelaide’s memories confirmed his suspicions.

Adelaide waited, arms crossed. More moody teenager than young adult. Where Virgil matured, her emotional growth was stunted.

“He’s fifteen.”
            “I know.”
“Fifteen years old.”
            “Stop saying that.”

“No. He’s fifteen, Adelaide, you must see you, ah, you can't justify this?” he didn’t raise his voice or change its tone, staying calm and level. “Do you have any idea what this is going to do to him? Living with, living with this secret?”

She pressed her lips together angrily, shoulders hunched up. “He doesn’t have to live with it alone. We both made a decision. You didn’t have to send him away like that.”

Yavin rubbed the back of his head, sighing in frustration as he leaned forward with elbows on knees. Easy for her to say.

“It can’t go on. You know it, ah, it can’t,” he looked up and clasped his hands together. “We need to lay down ground, that is, lay down ground rules.”

Adelaide’s thunderous expression told him she knew exactly where he could shove his rules. Her fury was genuine. Not, he thought, dissimilar to a mother’s fury.

“I need you to promise this won’t, ah, won’t happen again.” Yavin enunciated slowly and clearly. “And I need you to keep as much distance as you can from Virgil. Starting right um, right now.”

Yavin didn’t understand. He never understood.

It had been like this from the very beginning. She remembered coming home from Hogwarts vacation in the summer[1] of her fourth year, only to find that her parents hired a new tutor for Virgil. Laidie had been opposed to the idea, considering what happened with the last tutor.

Even though Morgenthau proved to be attentive and kind, she didn’t realise he would become a family fixture. A third, sometimes-there parent.

“If that’s what Virgil wants…” Laidie trailed off, crossing her arms so tightly she was practically hugging herself. “If it’s what he wants, we’ll stop. But you can’t expect me to stop seeing him altogether.”

Who the fuck was Yavin to make that demand? He thought he knew Virgil but he was wrong. Her brother was clever and gorgeous and so much more than some kind of pet being taught to do mind tricks.

Adelaide knew it would be fine the next time she saw Virgil. They would have to work around Yavin knowing but there was no reaso--

            “If you think things are fine between you and Virgil, then why did he leave?” Yavin leaned back in the armchair, crossing his legs. “Why didn’t he insist on staying?”

Her gaze snapped to him, sharp: “Get out of my head.” He was so still - and the air around him was strange, warped. In fact, everything in the flat looked warped. As if they were submerged in a clear jelly.

                “Why should I get out?” his voice sounded distant and underwater. “So that I don't realise that you’re going to lie to me? That you dream about what it would be like to live with him like this? Forever?”

Why wasn’t he stammering? Adelaide blinked and realised that she was sitting on the other armchair across from Yavin, without any memory of moving? What was going on? She felt sick.

1.	July 1999 - Stick Up For Yourself Son

“I’m going to give you a choice,” he spoke through his mind, even as another part of his attention was ruthlessly sifting through Adelaide’s memories - causing temporal disturbances in the witch’s perception.

There wasn’t time to put on kid gloves.

She had moved to the other armchair, head in her hands. Breathing hard. Her hair had come loose from the bun, and fell down the sides of her face like a ragged curtain.

  “It’s a very easy choice, Laidie. You can have things your way. Oh, yes. You can play house with your little brother, if you don’t mind Edgar and Angela knowing.”

Adelaide shrieked. He flinched.

“Or you can forget.” Yavin paused, allowing that to sit in that silence for only a few seconds. “It will be easier on him. If you forgot.”

She dropped her hands and stared in a desperate, haunted way that reminded him strongly of Virgil. Brother and sister. Adelaide was so ready to accept Virgil as her partner in life.

Once subconscious, her desire had been fully realised in the last two weeks - it drove her to want more. To allow herself to want more. How did he help someone who wouldn't let him help her?

            “What will I remember?” she whispered, hoarse.
“Only that you, ah, that you two fought about Emmylou.” Yavin relaxed; he could see she wanted to relent. “I promise it won’t hurt.”

Laidie wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and shook her head. “Yes it will, you bloody liar.”

He smiled. Just a touch.

Adelaide’s bedroom was tidied, sheets cleaned with the aid of a quick charm. Some of Virgil’s clothes, left behind, had to be brought to the guest room.

There wasn’t much else otherwise to cover up in terms of evidence. He even checked Laidie’s personal diary - she’d been too busy to make an entry since last month. Lucky him. Yavin returned to the living room, where the witch in question was sitting by the fireplace.

She stared into space, half asleep.

He checked the clock on the mantel. Over an hour since Virgil left. It had taken a good deal of time for Yavin to alter Adelaide’s memories. Two weeks contained a lot of material, in addition to a completely fictitious scenario painting his own arrival. One had to improvise.

This didn’t mean Laidie's feelings weren’t still there but those would mellow or alter with time.

Before he returned to Italy he would drop by to double check his craftsmanship. And until then, Adelaide Carstairs simply wasn’t a priority.

Virgil was on his second cappuccino, sitting at the cafe window. So much for half an hour.

One of the baristas told him a creepy old man was around earlier asking suspicious questions. He reassured them that Yavin was, in fact, his godfather. This wasn’t true - just something he and Yav would say to strangers in place of a convoluted truth.

He was dying to go back to the flat, to be with Laidie. She must hate him for leaving. As anxious as he was, Virgil knew he shouldn't go back. He made his bed and now he must lie in it. What was Yavin telling her? What was he going to do? Would he tell Edgar and Angela?

This last thought made him want to vomit. Virgil sipped coffee and tried to take another bite of the ham and cheese croissant he ordered.

            “There he is,” a server commented, glancing out the window as they cleared an adjacent table. “You should really advise him against the hat.”

True enough, Yavin was crossing the street in their direction. Virgil didn’t know what to do with himself at first and drank the rest of his coffee in three quick gulps. He got up when the older wizard entered, a bell above the door dancing.

Yavin spared a quick glance for the neglected lunch. “We’ll get you something, ah, light on the train. Come on.”

He lifted his straw hat, placing it on Virgil’s head before reaching for the duffel bag under the table.

“Train?” Virgil followed him out, turning back only to wave at the muggles behind the counter. “What train?”

1.45pm

It was a muggle train, Kings Cross to the City of Oxford.

Virgil initially didn’t understand why they weren’t apparating but when he boarded the carriage, he saw that it was empty. Then he understood this is how Yavin intended on having the conversation. Alone, without anywhere to run or anything to do. The old man knew him too well.

There were pastries, assorted finger sandwiches, bottled water and a bowl of fruit waiting in one of the booths. He sat on one side, his mentor across to face him.

The train moved off with a jerk. Nobody would be in to disturb but Virgil didn’t say anything, reaching for food first. He wolfed down two cucumber sandwiches and a clementine in the time it took for train tunnels to give way to the outer cityscape.

Yavin poured sparkling water into clear plastic cups. He looked older than Virgil remembered. Was there always that much white in his hair?

“How many of those lines did I put on your face, Yavin?” he asked while buildings outside were taken over by countryside scenes.

“Don’t flatter yourself.” Yavin snorted, not unkindly.

Virgil’s smile was brittle. The train broke free of London, cutting across the wasteland of the great British countryside. That’s what they called it, him and the boy. A wasteland created by the greed of English kings. Any other day, they would lament over ancient woodland and extinct creatures.

Today, he sipped his water and held himself together for the boy's sake. “Alright, Virgil. We have, um, have approximately -” Yavin checked his watch, “ - an hour.”

Everything about Virgil’s bearing was rigid, defensive. Laidie tried to explain to Yavin that her brother wasn’t made of glass - but look at him now. He was still a kid in many ways and it hurt him to know that his experience would compound past traumas.

No, it wouldn’t take a lot to shatter Virgil.  “I know Adelaide’s side of the, hm, of the story,” he tried to get the ball rolling. “Tell me yours.”

Voices filled his head from the other train carriages - the inane tumult of muggles going about their lives, thinking about hair appointments and other peoples’ shoes and front doors locked or unlocked. He shut them out forcefully, pale. Basic occlumency.

Sometimes it felt like he could disappear - the static of his mind might materialise, a mist, and dissolve. And there would be no more Virgil. Peter Pan’s disembodied shadow.

Virgil touched his lips, hesitant. His fingers smelled of citrus.

“I wanted it,” he lowered his hands to his lap and stared at the lines crossing his palms. “I… I was going to have to, eventually. Have sex. And I thought it would be better if. If, um. If it was Adelaide, the first time. I would be safe.”

A flicker of a glimpse e at his old companion. Yavin nodded slowly.

He stopped to collect himself, breathing in and out. There was a sound across the table, then a dip in the seat next to him. A solid, reassuring arm over his shoulder.

            “There’s nobody else here...” his mentor’s tone was matter-of-fact, unemotional.

Virgil let out a sob and quickly covered his mouth.  “I’m disgusting,” he hissed once he caught a hold of his breath. “I’m disgusting, what’s wrong with me?”

He leaned down, resting his head against Virgil’s for a second.  “You’re not. Hey. Hey.”

The blond glanced up reluctantly, eyes full of self-loathing. They could cut, his eyes. “Don’t lie to me. I know what I did, I’m not a child.”

Yavin gave him a squeeze and let go, with a sound that might have been a laugh. Adelaide made the same distinction about Virgil.

There was something cold about the way Virgil went about things. He wanted to lose his virginity, so he did. Maybe he meant to lose it to a friend or someone from school - that’s what he told his sister. But confronted by his sister's desire, her safety and comforts... yes, Yavin could see how it was.

It was logical. And to write to Yavin, out of his depth, expecting Merlin knew what - also, logical.

“You’re fifteen,” he said and Virgil cut in with a glare: “Sixteen in November.”
            “Not yet,” Yavin pointed out. “And I don’t think, uh, I don’t think Laidie cares either way, do you?”

He watched the boy fall quiet. “If she cared, she would have, uh, would have waited,” he tilted his head to the side. “Waited at least until you were out of Hogwarts. But if she did that, if she waited, could she have counted on you to give in?”

His wife used to tell him that if was a devil’s word - but Yavin functioned within if because it taught you to see outside your immediate circumstance.

            “It’s not like that, it’s not her fault.”  Virgil’s eyes were hard, in spite of tears.. “Leave Adelaide alone. Why can’t you just… just tell me I’m awful, Yavin? Tell me and get it over with!” he kicked the seat across in frustration.

“Because you’re not." Yav turned so that they were facing each other better. “Listen. You were always, um. Always going to run the risk of being hypersexual.”

Virgil moved closer to the window, away. Wary. When they spoke of his trauma nowadays it seemed far away - the effects spread out over the years, helped along by Yavin’s counselling. But he never shied from the subject, never gave Virgil an excuse to avoid it.

“No judgement.” Yavin raised both his hands and then his eyebrows, frank. “It… it happens. To some people with history like, ah, like yours, it can develop.”

They needed to have this talk now instead of later. He wouldn’t stick around Oxford for too long. “Taking the initiative, pursuing the experience. It puts you in control of an intimate act that frightens you.”

Virgil looked out the window and crossed his arms over his stomach, hunched forward. Yavin lowered his hands.

“What you two did was human,” he spoke quietly. “ I won’t, I promise, I don’t think any, ah, any less of you for it. But Adelaide should know right from wrong.”

Virgil hated when Yavin put into words something he had been grappling for months, if not years. It made him feel naked and exposed.

Being teased as Virgil the Virgin wasn’t the reason he wanted to have sex. He wanted to have sex because he wanted to get it over with, this big thing looming over his life like an inevitable curse. Everyone had to eventually, right?

“Sleeping with her didn’t feel wrong,” he spoke to the window, incapable of looking the other wizard in the face. “It felt good, comforting. I felt wanted and not… not like a freak.”

            “Then why did you write to me?” Yavin’s voice barely contained a question mark. “If it didn’t feel wrong, Virgil, why did you write?”

They were passing farmland now. Green and flat to the horizon. He bit his bottom lip, hard, willing himself to answer.

“I love her, I do, I just. I didn’t understand.” Virgil swallowed, looking over his shoulder at Yav. “When we were... together, there were all these - t-these feelings washing over me. Hers. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand what she was feeling.”

He saw Yavin’s expression soften. Why? Why look at him like that? Virgil burned behind his eyes.

              “Your sister is a grown witch,” that deep, halting voice droned on relentlessly. “With her own life and friends and, ah, her own problems. Why should you understand those things?”

The colour returned to his cheeks. What Laidie felt, the hunger she felt and the… the neediness of it. How she loved Virgil so much, she considered him an extension of herself. He hadn’t expected those feelings.

And he hadn’t wanted them, either. It was too much. Virgil wasn’t enough to fit into those feelings.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“You’re going to stay away from Adelaide.” Yavin replied, having already had time to think about this. “And you’re going to carry on like you usually do.”

There was a pause for Virgil to gather himself. The young man turned around in his seat, sniffly but clear-eyed. “She’s going to be mad.”

He shook his head and a conspiritial look entered his eye, spectacles gleaming.

“Maybe. She’ll be very mad about you two falling out over, ah, over you using Emmylou Carter.” Yavin checked his watch, tracking how much longer before they arrived in Oxford. “But that’s the kind of thing sisters get over.”

Virgil sat straighter, alert. “What did you do?”

“What did you want me to do when you wrote?” he tilted his head to the side, eyeing the blonde searchingly. “Hm? You could have, ah, left on your own. I’m not a taxi service. Why did you get me involved?”

They fell silent and Virgil shifted, uncomfortable.

            “I don’t know. I just. I trust you,” he licked his lip nervously. “I thought you would… I thought you would know what to do.”

“Thank you for your trust.” Yavin smiled, voice dry. “I, hm. Well I had a conversation with Adelaide and we both agreed it would be… easier for you, if she didn’t remember. It will give you ah, ah, chance to process what's happened without interference."

Virgil didn’t need to know that he practically blackmailed Laidie into agreeing. The only sense she would listen to was the threat of Edgar and Angela finding out. Yavin held her original memories in his mind palace, intact and hidden. One day he would return them.

The timing of such a day depended less on Laidie’s ability to handle the memory and more on Virgil’s ability to handle his sister.

He would be lying to himself if he didn’t acknowledge a sudden burst of relief. Virgil slumped against the train seat, blinking.

If she didn’t remember? She wouldn’t remember? He bit his bottom lip, thinking of the last time they kissed. Barely a few hours ago, the both of them lounging in satin ivory sheets - having a lie in on a Saturday morning.

He tasted himself in her mouth. Yes, Adelaide had fussed over him.

But she wouldn’t remember. It was his memory alone, now. Sort of. Yavin technically knew. Virgil glanced at his mentor, who eerily did not show any sign of revulsion or reproof.

“So I just… I pretend nothing happened? I mean,” he rewound what Yav said, gently frowning. “I pretend we argued and… that’s it? I keep away from her?”

            “I’ll show you how I altered her memories,” the other wizard explained. “But you’ll need to keep busy as you can. Go find your cousins, um, go into town with them. And you have a play going on, don’t you? Lean into that.”

Virgil nodded jerkily, thoughts racing. He could keep himself busy, yes. “But Virgil,” Yavin carried a warning in his timbre. “If you’re going to go through with your plans, either with the Carter witch or your friends… please, I’m asking you to be conscious of what you’re doing.”

This sounded dangerously close to the sex talk he got from Edgar years ago. Yavin changed tack, probably realising the same.

            “Not like that,” he made a dismissive gesture and reached out to tap Virgil’s chest. “I mean in here. Be conscious of, uh, of what sex means to you and what you want it to mean. Have some self-awareness.”

Serious words. Virgil wanted to laugh, hysterically. He was a virgin up until literally very very recently and here was Yavin, talking like he was about to go out and fuck half his school year.

“Yeah, fine,” he rolled his eyes and looked out the window once more. “Whatever.”

He watched the young man turn from him. In one motion, Yavin could see a distance growing between himself and Virgil over the next few years.

If he entered Virgil’s life too often or stuck around for too long, he would only serve to remind him of this moment. Of the shame.

His mentee was already a deeply private wizard. To live with the constant mortification - the knowledge that Yavin kept their incestuous secret in the ocean of his mind -  might be enough to ruin their relationship. He needed to give Virgil time as well as distance.

The countryside grew populous whilst the train sped on, showing them scenes of smaller towns and muggle factories.

Yavin finished his water. He was still washing out the taste of vomit in his mouth, which had been an unfortunate side effect of digging into Laidie’s head.

He, too, needed time and distance.