"You think you could give someone else a go at the telly, once in a while?" John asked, raising an eyebrow. Harry looked up at him from where she was curled tight on the couch, knees drawn up to her chest and fingers loosely twisted into themselves.
"You're welcome to join me," she said politely in the high-pitched little-girl voice that she adopted to annoy him, when the fancy struck. It didn't work very well these days; she broke into huskiness after a few words.
"Have you ever considered that we're not all interested in that… stuff?"
"What else would you be watching?" she asked of him, and her tone was scathing. "Fiction? This is news, John. This is the world we live in."
"It's as much of a lie as anything," he said. "It's marketing."
"At least it's honest about that," she sighed, and then she chucked the remote control at him. "Whatever. You can have it."
"Don't tell me you're off drinking," John said.
"I am just going to go meet Clara," Harry said irritably. "You know how she feels about the drinking."
"She and the rest of us," was John's answer. "Don't be out too late. You've still got school tomorrow."
"John," Harry said, "you do realize tomorrow's a screening-day, yeah? You honestly think I'd skip school?"
"What, you honestly think that you're going to be discovered as a magical girl at your age?"
"You should really keep up with the news, John," Harry said as she packed her handbag, collecting its contents from where they were strewn about the mess that was the apartment. "They just discovered this boy, this savant, last month. He's your age. Miracles do occasionally happen."
"Yeah," John said. "Right. Say hi to Clara for me, will you?"
"Sure thing," Harry answered. "Make sure you behave, yeah? Wouldn't want you to miss the screening."
"Good-bye, Harry," John said, and he could hear his sister's laughter as she left.
Despite his previous objections, John didn't have a problem with the fusion of virtuality and truth that was broadcasted as current affairs – users of magic who battled against those that would harm the peace of the earth. Well, he did have a problem with it when he thought about the philosophy of it all, when he thought about how incredibly human it was to take that kind of a gift and turn it into a spectacle, but that didn't really take away the entertainment value of it. He'd become fond of it when he was bedridden for weeks after the Incident.
Even in a world mixed with the fantastic, people were desperate for heroes of some sort, any sort at all, and so there were screenings every month in case something nascent bloomed at an odd time, and so there were training camps for youth on a yearly basis. Harry loved them, pugilistic as she is, and John put up with them because they'd look good when he applied to schools. Still, he hadn't entirely forgiven them for the bullet wound in his shoulder and the limp that he was told existed entirely within his mind.
It had been an accident. Of course it had. The funny thing is, though, that when people talked about statistics, it was always how many people were discovered, how many made a difference. It was never the ones that slipped through the cracks, the ones that the system didn't reach out to protect.
John could do with the world he lived in being a little different. In the meantime, though, he didn't change the channel on the television.
A/N: This is the beginning of a fill for a prompt on the kinkmeme about mahou-shoujo-type johnlock. I have no idea how long it's going to be, but something tells me it will be a while before I'm done with this story.
~Mademise Morte, December 22, 2012.