title reference | outfit

Leaning over the back of a chair, light a shrug someone’s grandmother might have knit-- not Phil’s, he didn’t seem the type to keep such things around, but then he might surprise her, as he usually did-- she balanced on the thing’s two hind legs as if it were a rogue hippogriff. Or maybe something slightly less rogue. Chairs hardly moved on their own.

Squinting, she placed her palms flat on the shelf behind her and rested her chin atop her wrists, one tattooed with pretty gibberish and the other braceleted with something she nicked from George before their most recent brawl about his unmatched stupidity. Her smile, this new flavor’s, was nowhere near as captive as Laney’s, Miss Irving knew. Blondes. Who cared about blondes?

Apparently Laney.

Picking up some silver instrument she’d been eying, she sailed back to the ground, chair hitting the floor with an impressive thud. She looked toward her own blond, her fellow partier for the night, the ringer-in of new years and his special brand of candy, the young man who was older than he looked and also wickeder. She studied it suspiciously, looking for knobs, dials, something to start, perhaps ignite the flat. She didn't ask permission.

She let her wrist fall limp and crossed her legs, leaning back into the chair, making it as cozy as possible. She smiled a half smile. “I’m surprised you haven’t sold everything in your place. You’re a pretty mess, you know?”

Leaning forward, she fetched an idle cigarette from an ashtray full of more than just cigarette ashes, and took a drag. Phil, for all his trouble-making, was right up her alley-- he had his own place (to her knowledge, anyway, it was his), he had that invincible, superhuman something, even if it was on the graceful side, and half inspired by his age alone. And he had no Hogwarts uniform to rip off.

Leaving the silver thing tucked between the cushion and the chair itself, she stood up and traipsed some three steps, standing tall and lanky over the older man, who was lounged on another couch. "We need... some champagne... and some cake... and--" She paused, biting her lip in a sinful little smile. "Something to celebrate our New Year's Resolutions."

The girl hadn’t straight out told him her age, but he had a decent idea. It lay somewhere in that pink area between sixteen and twenty, and the indecision made him smile. Lorraine, the name of somebody’s grandma, and Laney like that girl from a Beatles song. Phil peered up at her behind his white lashes, lazily eyeing the girl and tonguing his cig filter even as it burnt down around his fingers.

Philomenes crushed the smoldering cig to dust in his hand, and sprinkled it into the ashtray to join the dead rollies and gum wrappers and lipstick red pills. His laugh twinkled through the dank flat like little silver bells.

“Well you never asked what I do for a living, babe. Not that I’d tell you, of course.” The smile he flashed her could have dazzled, if there wasn’t so much wickedness there.

He might have been running the grundgiest library in London for a job. Bookshelves (more like planks on cinderblocks) lined every available wall, sagging  with books easily ten times older than Laney herself. In addition to books, there were crates upon crates of things locked out of sight.

The floor was covered in empty butterbeer bottles and the dust of crushed herbs, while the closet-sided bathroom smelled of concentrated bleach and piss. Water speckled issues of Wicked Witch lay open on his bed and coffee table, old to the point of being vintage spank material.

It was obvious Phil either didn’t have women over much, or he just didn’t give a shit.

The flat was about the size of a shoebox, humming fridge looming on one end and his mattress flopped across the hardwood on the other. What little furniture he had was a mishmash of styles, the condition of each ranging from ‘shitty’ to ‘really shitty’.

He flopped his feet off the cracked glass coffee table and let his legs fall open before hauling himself up from the couch. A witch in strategically tattered house elf rags arched and winked up at Laney from a mag centerfold.

“I don’t drink champagne,” he said after drawing up to full height, cupping Laney’s chin. Phil lingered there as if he was going to kiss her, but instead he dragged his thumb across her lips and slinked past her to the refrigerator. He pried the door open with his boot and clinked around inside. Unsurprisingly, Phil’s fridge was filled with booze, potions, sweets, and not a trace of real food.

“Let’s see…I could pour some absinthe for you, but I fear I’m all out of sippy cups.” Phil grinned and swished a heavy green glass bottle at her, La Fee Verte scrawled cross the label and a topless little fairy lewdly straddling the ‘V’.  “And there’s some stale German chocolate cake, but it’s probably laced with something or other. Most things in here are.”

“Of course," she echoed. "It’s not as if I’m... standing in your... home... or anything.” There was a pause, the slightest intonation in the way she said home, as if she were mocking him. In truth, it was a teenager’s dream: a drug den for beautiful devils and con artists and the anarchical holier-than-thou of the wizarding underworld. A complete shambles, in short.

Her step-mother would die on the spot.

Laney smirked fiendishly to herself.

Perhaps they could use her body for the next batch of-- whatever Phil cooked and kept to himself. Because he was definitely cooking something in this shadowy little haven of his.

Her jawline tilted just so, her eyebrow inclined toward him, inviting him to tell her more of what he promised not to.

Before flouncing over to him, she ran her fingers through the dust coating a blood-red leather hardback with gold-rimmed pages. At least they looked gold, when one squinted. It really was dirty, the rebel’s life.

She found herself stretching, just a bit, being pulled in by some indiscernible charm in his silvery mug. But when he pulled away, escaped with that sort of philandering saunter, Laney looked down for want of appearing unaffected. She picked up her cigarette, flicking ashes at the tramp in the social serial.

“Of course you don’t. You drink the blood of virgins,” she murmured, just loud enough for him to hear. She let the smoke crawl past her lips, toward the musty ceiling. “Too bad there aren’t any around here.”

Promenading behind him, keen Seeker’s eyes passing over every object, fingers occasionally reaching out to drag across the spines of books, she caught up with him front of the fridge. Standing behind him, one arm limp with nonchalance, the other crossed like a lazy cat’s, holding the smoke indolently over her slim muscles and sheer, not particularly weather-proof sweater, she peaked over his shoulder to assess the presumably edible contents of his kitchen.

Keyword being presume.

She scrunched her nose. At Philomenes as much as the fridge. “If I look like a toddler, what are you doing with me, old man?” Her arm uncrossed itself, jabbing sharply at his side, and she weaseled her way into the space between him and the fridge. “I’ll take the absinthe and you Floo for some real food.”

She grabbed the bottle and leaned into the creaky chill. The light went off as she took her time standing there, sizing him up. “You can lace it with something fresh.” She opened the spirit and took a swig, tearing it away from her throat and tensing her muscles so as not to flinch. There were many things Laney had tried when she wasn't supposed to have done so, and at an age that would make a mother vomit on new carpet. Absinthe was not one of them.

It didn't work for so long, and she slipped away from him, tripping just a fraction as she blinked hard. Her eyes were bigger than her stomach. She recovered awkwardly, making a beeline for the couch and throwing herself into the newly vacant Phil-shaped bit. "Have you ever spiked curry?"

"Why, thank you for clarifying. And here I was, thinking I was so special.” The smile that curled across his lips was wide as Cheshire, and probably could have deflowered a dozen nuns with its mere vulgarity. Probably – not making any guarantees. “Following strange men back to their homes in the belly of Knockturn by dead of night, my word. You’d have to be a slag or merely stupid, poppet.”

Though the words themselves were pricking, his tone was warm.

Shame that she slipped away like that; the cold and closeness had coaxed up nothing but heat. Not too much of a shame though. The muscle bone and sinew of her had stood between Philomenes and the lovely array of potions housed in the cavern of his fridge. He didn’t follow her or answer her question, in favor of letting his spindly fingers wander over the chill glass vials, a veritable rainbow of them. Among on the lollipop colors, Phil plucked out the most benign looking of them: clear and clean as water. That acquired, he kicked the fridge closed.

“Can’t say I’ve spiked curry before. Don’t you know junkies live on smokes and cake? Oh, and virgin blood, naturally. Much too bad we don’t have any about. It’s nice and sweet.”

He moved across the slim distance to Laney’s side, daintily picking his way through the mine field of bottles like a long-legged bird. Cute, was that the word for it? Some barely legal schoolgirl playing at being a grown up yet then sprawling on his couch was…darling, and plenty other adjectives besides.

Philomenes bent down over her, one hand balanced on the arm of the couch and the other stuffed under the cushion beneath her. Silvery hair fell across his face and tickled across the nape of her neck, obscuring his toothy smile for a moment. The faint sweetness of her shampoo laced ever so lightly with sweat tugged something like a sigh from his lips.

“…however, I don’t discriminate, no not at all.”

His fingertips brushed the cool metal of the syringe’s cylinder, and he dragged his hand out from under her. Phil flopped down on the opposite end of the tattered loveseat, their lanky legs tangling. He feigned disinterest in the closeness by examining the used hypodermic needle for couch lint.

There was something in his smile that was disgustingly beautiful. Boyish limbs and freshly-chopped hair (much to her step-mother’s horror), Laney was not nearly so pretty as Philomenes when he smiled. Her bran of beauty was darker, more burnt, definitively smokey. His was pearly, blinding, almost entrancing. She’d grown up in the wizarding world and knew enough to know that he had to have some veela in his blood. But she’d never been trapped in a room with a man like this. She wondered if that’s what hallucinogens were like.

She escaped to the couch just in time.

“Following strange men back to their homes in the belly of Knockturn by dead of night, my word. You’d have to be a slag or merely stupid, poppet.”

Her face souring beneath choppy fringe, she chose not to answer. At least not right away.

But there on the couch, with the silvery silhouette of an hellbent angel looming over her, it was hard not to open her mouth and give him an answer, if only to keep the vision of them there just a little bit longer. The pull was worse now than it had been in the alley. Then the Absinthe, just one sip, or two, had loosened her muscles considerably, was now warming her veins, and chirping in its own language that Laney ought to investigate this oh-so-curious scene a little further.

Again she thought he might kiss her, and again she was sorely mistaken. She held her breath until he was gone, and then breathed deep, her lungs filling with the pain of misuse and dodgy air. She felt him plop down opposite her, and her eyes moved just barely to the abandoned armchair, where she’d left something stuck between the cushion and the shabby frame.

“Smokes and cake it is, then,” she murmured, sounding unbothered, and sat up, suppressing a shiver at the needle he’d produced from the underbelly of the couch. How close had it been to her skin? Laney didn’t dwell on it. Instead she crawled closer, shoes falling off as she plucked at the laces without care.

“But you’ll have to give me something more interesting to smoke if you want me to eat that vomit in your fridge.” She gingerly grabbed the needle from his fingers, knocking knees with him as she curled up beside him. She looked at it for the briefest moment before tossing it at the table. “Following strange men, I must be hungry, right?” She grinned a gamine grin, moving closer still, and grazed his cheek with her mouth and nose and breath. She wasn’t a slag and she wasn’t stupid, and Philomenes Kecklepenny, silver hair extraordinaire, was going to learn the damn truth. The beautiful bastard. “Can’t I just have a dead mum and daddy issues?”

As much as he love, love, loved the closeness, an icicle cold glower flash-freezed his gaze when Laney slipped the syringe out of his fingers. A full on snap was held down only by the sleek warm slide of her body alongside him, the tongue and teeth grazing his neck. A languid smile slipped across his lips, and Phil’s hazy eyes were shuttered by heavy lids. He tilted his head back on the arm of the couch, to expose more of his neck to her.

Cloudy-slow as he seemed, the arm not coyly slinked around her narrow waist flashed out to the coffee table and retrieved the syringe. All the while he dragged his knuckles down her ribs, fanned his huge spindly hand out and let his fingertips wander down the faint inlet of her waist. They wandered higher up her body, seeking softness yet finding none. When they ventured a touch higher, they did.

Philomenes nuzzled through the dark nest of Laney’s hair, savoring the the smooth drag on his skin and the ghost of her perfume, sweetened by body heat and barely there. His mouth drifted to the shell of her ear, and his tongue flicked a little silver stud.

“It’s really sweet,” he whispered, terrible grin evident in his tone, “that you think it matters to me. You can have whatever you want.”By that he meant issues, himself, the whole damn apartment.

He brushed a kiss across her temple, snaked his hand out of her top. It lingered on the sharp hillock of her hip, thumbnail tracing the jag of bone under skin. With his other hand, he twitched the syringe in her peripheral.

“Though I must admit...” That hazy smile had probably won over more wayward schoolgirls than even Phil would be willing to claim. “I wasn’t thinking of smoking.”

"Do it," she murmured, almond-like, russet Seeker's gaze noting the needle point looming somewhere beyond the couch that contained their Honeyduke's Whirled Lolli of limbs. (Flavors now included tobacco ghosts, the sickly-sweet must of stronger inhalants, and the taut flesh of junkies who didn't seem to mind having their necks explored by barely-legal schoolgirls. All in all a clearly limited-time offer.)

Laney's skin prickled at the shadow of his words. Nothing mattered. He didn't care. She loved it, the anonymity, the recklessness, the absence of clocks and attachment. But it was also different. She was young, so much younger than she ever liked to think, so much younger than anyone's mouth would dare admit aloud, lest it meet her fist and wind up not so pretty. She was young and she had never done anything like this, had never met a stranger so beautiful and ruined, had never followed him back to his cozy little drug den, had never invited him up her blouse, down her tiny leather shorts, and, quite literally, into her flesh.

Her eyelids fluttered like an unimpressed cat's, but her mouth evoked enough emotion to let him know she was pleased and willing. Her trail of kisses stopped and breath became longer, more audible. Her own hands moved down just as his wound their way out of her top and toward the coffee table. She fished for the button on his trousers and offered one lazy kiss between his mouth and cheek, pulling back to refocus her attention on his eyes. They were a hypnotist's eyes, light where hers were dark, terrifying and pretty and charming as a doll's, but deeper, scarier, and much, much less telling. For all the ways they changed in quarter-second flashes, issuing warnings like flare lamps, even Laney could not read them quite so thoroughly. "Do it," she repeated. "I want to know." Then she forced his eyes shut, kissing those too, and her fingers went about their work down below his belt.