outfit


The gold hit the wood like a fire failing to spark, but warmth it did bring: Laney frequented the place well enough to know that paying in advance was never frowned upon. And what business savvy mouth would do such a thing? Frowning was for Laneys... Ladies who had just lost their purses.

"Oi! " Laney grimaced, or growled, or offered some million-dollar-raggamuffin equivalent as the hyperventilating broad pushed her way between the two bar stools, waving her arms like a drowning man. "The loo's over there," the young seeker offered, a nod of her sharp jaw toward the darkened corridor. She turned back to the bar, the glare in her russet eyes saying I paid first. But the woman didn't move, and even the bartender, undoubtedly unphased by such nightly occurrences as shitfaced singles and full bladders, looked a little uncomfortable. Laney's ears came to, working their way through the screaming.

A lost purse indeed.

She wasn't kidding, was she?

The Irving woman put her palm to her brow, pressing overgrown fringe atop her eyes like a safety blanket. "Make it a double," she hissed, swirling on her bar seat away from the sobbing woman. If it were Laney's nicked purse, the offender would be on the ground, both eyes bruised. Then, if it were Laney's nicked purse, it wouldn't have been nicked in the first place. She had better sense than that. And this particular offender-- whom she had just hunted down, her hawk's gaze zeroing in-- might think twice.

She grabbed her drink blindly as it was levitated somewhere near her elbow, and hopped up from her chair, sticky black trousers alive with saunter as she abandoned the bartender and the slowly-melting heap of mascara and a bad dye job.

The blond she approached was much more authentic in his... blondness. Not that was he was shallow. (Oh, who she was kidding? He was the shallowest clever man she'd ever met, the thieving lowlife.) "Still unemployed, are we?" She asked, joining his table without being invited, forgoing the chair across from his to sink into the one directly beside him. She sat like a man, her legs apart, her posture awful for someone who made a living on a broom. But there was still that feminine something to her, a lethal touch that wasn't bound to leave anytime soon. She could get on with it, offer the biting, oh-so-appropriate chastisement ('Why don't you give back the purse before the owner comes in and discovers he has to hire a crew to distill the cheap liquid foundation from his mead supply?') but it was hardly grounds for a reunion.

"What are you having?" She asked, tilting her head as she held her own drink at fist's length from her lips. Obviously she was buying.

“Oh. I was wondering when you were going to notice me.”

Silvery, smoky, slow voice – Phil was plainly spiced on something, Philomenes’ attention tore off in two different directions. One way for the girl who’d slinked down beside him, one way for the Bedazzled purse hiding in plain sight on his table. He decided on both, sleepy grey eyes sliding up and down every inch of Lorraine Quidditch Prodigy Irving as if she were a charcuterie platter; broken hands sifting through the purse for sickles and galleons by touch alone.

Sometimes, Phil regretted dropping perfectly workable, marginally sane girls for Maxime Scrivener, time after time. Laney was one of those rare times. Crazy junkie love and debauched seventeen year old love were about square. He guessed it ultimately came down to whether he wanted to debauch a girl or he wanted a girl to debauch him. There was an endorphin rush, so like and unlike doxie eggs, when he’d show little ickle Laney something she hadn’t had before, or better yet do something to her she’d never done before.

Whether or not she wore that naiveté as a mask just because she knew he liked it wasn’t important.

“I am not unemployed. Black market smuggling, robbery, selling illegal substances to children, and stealing dumb bitch’s purses are hardly grounds for unemployment. We both grab shiny things. Cute little magpies, aren’t we?” Phil looked cozy as a cat on a sofa, soaking up the simple warmth of another body in the February cold and the smell of booze on a girl’s breath.

Once he was done glutting the purse to his satisfaction (seven galleons, four sickles, two knuts, a few of those wrapped chocolate-caramel things, and the woman’s wand), he levitated the thing back around the woman’s feet and then dispelled the bedazzling charm, all wandwork done in relative anonymity beneath the table.

“Dunno,” Phil said after a moment to Laney’s mention of a drink. “Hot hard cider or something. S’fucking freezing. Hot anything.”

Like hell he was. Waiting for her to notice. He didn’t wait for anyone. It was Laney who noticed him, she thought stubbornly. It was usually the case, too. Perhaps not tonight. Or maybe never. Maybe he always noticed, his thieves eyes as clever as her Seeker’s ones, and his pretty little grin a mask of lies just like Laney’s intimidating nonchalance. Maybe. But if it were the case, he never said anything. He wasn’t bothered like she was. One could tell when Philomenes Kecklepenny was bothered-- the whole bird dilemma-- but now he looked as smooth as silk, and about as ruffled.

And it infuriated her.

But a part of her, that little girl yearning for dark things in dark corners of a darker world than her own, still loved it. Let him loose from the bird cage, she thought. And let herself loose, too. She could feel his eyes on her, and she couldn't pretend her heart didn't thump just a little bit. He was the antithesis of Frank, the man she'd been chasing for Merlin knew how many months now, and with no luck. What was happening to her? A losing streak! Laney Irving didn't lose.

She let out a breathy, sarcastic response, close-mouthed and not quite a laugh. “Oh, yes, we’re so alike... maybe I’ll give you PR man’s card and you can steal his dumb bitch’s purse.” She placed her elbows on the table, and crossed her arms one over the other, leaning forward, not bothering to close the space between the chair and the table. Her eyes fell down toward his lap, more interested in his fingers than the property he was pillaging. She liked them, his fingers, even when there were some missing. He’d always been good with his hands.

She sat back again, tilting her head as if stretching the muscles in her neck, and caught his eyes as he sent the purse away. She blindly pulled a back of cigarettes from the tightest bit of her clothing and shook two out with one slight of her wrist. She put them together like one, raising them to her lips, pausing only to say, “Light.” And then she shoved them both past her teeth, waiting for him to use that wand he seemed so very skilled with when it came to thinks like thievery and cancer.

Blowing smoke straight at him, she summoned a waiter with two fingers. “One hot hard cider and an Irish coffee, light on the coffee,” she said without looking at the scruffy boy, as she passed Phil one of the cigarettes.

She took a long, proper drag, and had a sip of her whiskey while she waited for... more whiskey. “How’s what’s-her-name?” She asked casually. Might as well get it out of the way. She knew her name, of course, but there little satisfaction in revealing as much. “You two making a cute little nest? Cooking up meth?”

Actually, though she loathed to admit it...

"I need your advice," she blurted out, quite suddenly. She tipped her cigarette into the ashtray, giving it an encouraging tap, letting the ashes collect on the ant hill of other people's bad habits. "Since you have--" She looked back to his lap, where this time there was no purse, and then caught his eye meaningfully. "And all," she finished, the look enough of a gesture without having to say the word. A little smile, friendly enough, appeared. "Maybe you can give me some perspective."

Phil’s easy smile flickered from his lips when she mentioned Max, lips a pale gash around his cigarette. His eyes slivered to sickled moons and he shot Laney a glance that was far from gentle, one nigh-invisible quirked to the point of wrinkling his forehead. But that faded quick enough. Philomenes cocked his head, hawk-like, mouth stretching into a toothy smile.

“I wish. I really wish.” He paused for a long drag on his cig, peering down at the stolen candy arrayed across the table top. “And come on, L,” he suggested pleasantly, words twined in smoke. “Don’t get bitchy now. You know what her name is.”

If she was going to be goddamn difficult, so would he. Everybody came out raw from that, Phil included, but that didn’t mean he’d show it too much. He cocked his cig away from her, all grace, so that the smoke would float into the eyes of a patron sitting close by. He went about unwrapping a caramel with his mangled hand as the dumb bitch at the bar found her purse and wailed with grief. He sucked off the chocolate coating and cracked the candy in half with his teeth.

“Bitching aside, though. No. She’s gone.” He faltered for a moment to swipe his thumb along his lower lip, digit coming away with a thin sheen of chocolate. He lapped it clean.

“Max has been gone for a long time. And not gone how she’s usually gone. Not ‘gone-until-she-gets-lonely-enough-to-start-sleeping-with-Phil-again-and-Laney-gets-left-out-in-the-cold’ gone.” Philomenes smirked, bitter as arsenic. Saying the girl’s name left a bad taste in his mouth. “Gone for nearly two years gone. So I hope that’s a comfort to your sweet little ego.”

He propped his elbow on the table, and swung his gaze up to Laney. It was still hazed with opiates roaring through his blood, though there was a faint brittleness there. Two years after the fact or not, the nerve still obviously ran raw and deep.

It took him a moment or two to wind down from that, and wander back to the girl’s pointed question. Phil looked down to where she’d indicated with the slide of her eyes. He rolled his lip in his teeth for a moment, a slight smile blooming.

“You want…to ask me for advice on a man solely because…?” There it was, back to more-or-less normal Philomenes – a silver bell peal of laughter that seemed to break the Hogshead gloom for half a second. A few people glanced up from their drinks and looked away again, some flushed and most just perplexed. “I’ll have to remember to ask you for advice on women solely because you have a pair of darling ovaries, love.”

That was the moment when the server came over with their drinks. The boy wrinkled his nose up at that comment, but scuttled away before he could hear anymore about Lorraine Irving’s reproductive organs.

Laney wrinkled her nose and looked away, consoling her pouted, heart-shaped mouth with the kiss of nicotine. How many she had had that day, it was no easy to say-- doubtless more fags than she had fingers. The packs piled up in her bag, and it was a small wonder she could get through training with lungs like hers. Her father, who favored cigars, had always told her her insides were made of iron.

Perhaps her heart was, too.

"Mmm, right," she murmured, loud enough for him to hear. Her eyes stayed on the woman, newly reunited with her purse, and ever the face of Stupid in the prequel to the discovery of its gutted insides. She found her sour lips tug into a smile, despite Phil's insistence on telling her what was and wasn't in her memory. Yes, she knew it. She knew it well, and it made her want to vomit all over his fresh new stash of golden galleons. She turned back to him, blowing smoke from the deep drag she'd held in until it swirled across her throat and turned it red with protest, hoarse with complacency. She was a bundle of contradictions, Laney Irving. "But why should I waste my tongue saying it?" She tilted her, her jawline sharp as any male heir to her father's bank account. It was her mopey, stubborn, Laney way of letting him know (over and over again) that he'd hurt her feelings. Iron heart or not.

She'd been a girl then (as if she weren't one now) and everything had seemed so much... more. The money signs on the contracts that danced in her dreams, the weight of pesky N.E.W.T.s barring her exit from the prison that was Hogwarts, the promise of body heat and tobacco-flavored kisses and witty tales of druglords and Greek gods and something not quite human. Philomenes had been the thing on the other side of the bridge, not a boy to devour in the grass near the Forbidden Forest. He was London and Knockturn Alley and post-graduate gloom. He was silvery and excellent and a complete and utter nightmare. He was the exact thing her father would loathe, the person who might run her step-mum into a gutter and have her purse for his own while he was at it. If he could bother at all. Often, he seemed to cool to really care.

But Laney had cared, and that's why she stared him down now, all hawk's eyes daring his own Veela-ish ones to flare up and challenge her.

"No one leaves me in the cold," she retorted needlessly. It was in vain, but she didn't look away. Maybe if she stared long enough, the lies would fashion themselves into glimmering truths. She shrugged. "I was just curious, but I'm not surprised... there are bigger jackpots than you in London, Phil, even for that sort." A flash of her teeth, and the single dimple that flanked them, and Laney was apparently in a better mood.

"But you always did have a way with the ladies." She bent forward on her elbows and shook her head. "Mystifying," she whispered, nearly losing her composure in his hypnotist's gaze. She leaned back again, posture positively terrible, and sent a crude hand gesture after the waiter. A flick of her wand, and he went flying toward the bar, toward the poor puddle of woman who was sobbing out the last of her consciousness over an empty purse. She studied Phil in that oh, you way. "You can't see them right now, but I assure you my ovaries are cowering in fear. There are other things, though..." She trailed off a moment, and reached for her drink.

"Anyway--" To the point. "How do you resist a girl when you're really into her?" She asked, her voice pushy with puzzle. "Or why?" Laney, ever herself, had never questioned Frank's attraction. "Is it because you can't...?" She looked down, gesturing with one hand, arguably a much blunter gesture than the one she'd just given the poor waiter. "Or is there some trigger? Do some guys go limp at the idea of a girl who can catch a snitch faster than they can get into her knickers?" Confident little thing.