That night, once Jack and Lukas had retreated into the bedroom, leaving Harry fast asleep on his new sofa bed, Lukas finally had a chance to ask the questions that had been buzzing in his head all day. They'd gone shopping earlier. Harry whizzed around the different stores, eventually having accepted his large budget, so they'd been alone most of the time, but Lukas wanted to wait until the conversation got the space it deserved.
They'd bought Harry a small set of new clothes and a couple of toys, and later, they'd bought big chest of drawers to go in the main room of the flat for Harry to keep all his things, along with the new sofa bed, another kitchen chair, and an armchair. Everything had been bought second- or third-hand but Jack still had a distinct grimace on his face when he counted the cash left in his wallet while they drove home in the van they'd borrowed off Kev.
Sitting on the bed with the duvet a puddle of duck-egg blue around his legs and tucked over his shoulders, Lukas showed Jack the note with his question.
'So, I think you know exactly why the Dark Lord went to kill Harry.'
A long while ago now, Jack had told Lukas about the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord. For the whole conversation, there'd been a kind of tautness to his face, as if he expected one of the words he mumbled to mark the breaking point where Lukas would scream and run and never look back, denounce him as evil and a scourge on the world. He'd been wrong, of course. Lukas didn't care. The only reason Lukas wouldn't have wound up in the ranks himself if he'd lived in Jack's time would've been rejection of a mark of servitude to some mere man.
Not now, but one day Lukas would be powerful enough that he'd never exist beneath someone's thumb again.
Jack, who was stretched out on his back with the duvet up to his stomach and one arm crossed behind his head, grinned sheepishly. "I do know a bit more than I told him."
'I suppose it's all inside information that you couldn't possibly have known? Tell me.'
"Alright. First things, you gotta accept prophecies and divination are unreliable but existing fields of magic." Lukas made a face and Jack laughed. "That's how most people feel about it, don't worry, but prophecies do come true a lot, usually because people tried to stop shit happening and all that fairy-tale nonsense. One of the guys in our circle, a guy named Severus Snape, overheard a prophecy and relayed it to the Dark Lord. I don't know the prophecy, only that it existed and that the Dark Lord decided it meant Harry.
"So ol' Sevvie reckoned he was in love with Harry's mother – like you don't wanna know how much I watched that guy mope over here, jeez – but yeah, so he decided to ask a favour from the Dark Lord seeing as he brought him the prophecy. The Dark Lord agreed – he did like them lot – and Snape asked him not to kill Lily Potter. Didn't give a shit about Harry and his dad – just don't kill Lily. The Dark Lord said he wouldn't kill her so long as she didn't get in the way. I bet you can guess what happened next."
'She refused to give up her son, the Dark Lord killed her, and you think something she did protected him?'
A big grin full of pride spread across Jack's face and Lukas found himself smiling back, a fuzzy warmth in his chest. "Bingo. No one knows what actually went down, but I seriously don't think the kid did anything. He was like one, for fuck's sake."
Well, that was all very tragic, almost made him want to steal the boy away entirely. Unfortunately, it sounded like people would notice if he disappeared. Lukas didn't know anything about magic, but he bet there were ways to find people with it.
Damn, it really was about time he stopped not knowing about things.
'I need to know more about magic. I guess I'll end up involved in this whether I want to be or not, so I want to know as much as I possibly can before then. I need some books. I need lots of books.'
"Yeah, you probably would've to be fair. You know I mentioned a place called Hogwarts? I must have at some point…"
Lukas shrugged. Jack might've. The name sounded familiar.
"Well, it's a school, basically. Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry." Lukas snickered at the pompous tone Jack put on. "They'd like you to think it's the only school and if not that then the best one, but it's just the one that happens to be in Britain. It's good, but I reckon Durmstrang is better, especially for dark-inclined people, like us."
'I suppose I have to go then.'
Jack laughed. "'Course you don't! You ain't gotta go, so long as you're getting some kind of education and fuck knows you've already like vanished from the grid, but look me in the eyes, kid, and tell me you're gonna turn down a learning opportunity."
Lukas shook his head. He never would.
"I can sort something out and get you into Durmstrang, if you like. I'm sure I've got some, uh, strings I could pull. Your mum's family are from Denmark so you might even get a letter."
'Harry will be going to Hogwarts?'
"Yeah, I can't do shit about that, not unless he turns it down himself, but Dumbledore will poke his nose into it and that's too dangerous for me."
'Dumbledore?''
"Albus Dumbledore, really powerful light wizard. Like, there were two people in the world who could stand up to the Dark Lord, and that were Mik and Dumbledore."
That was a slip. Jack always called Lukas's uncle Mikael, but Mik – the odd sounding nickname capturing that initial Scandinavian syllable – nestled on his tongue like a long dead friend. Did Jack know him better than he made out?
For now, Lukas didn't press. Jack didn't seem to have noticed. 'Well, if Harry's going I might as well go too and keep an eye on him. You can cover the darker side of my education.'
"Uh huh, sure thing. Y'know, talking about the old goat got me remembering. You know I disappeared upstairs last night?" Lukas nodded. "Well, I was having a nose about – y'know left a persuasive note with some dollar that should stop the Dursleys even thinking about telling anyone Harry's gone missing. Reckon they'll just bullshit about it to anyone that comes 'round anyway though, 'cause I found this note in a dresser that gives them a fucking wedge a month for keeping Harry with them, and considering the shit treatment he got, I bet they had a lot spare. They ain't gonna want anyone knowing they don't have him anymore or that cuts right off."
A pulse tightened at the base of Lukas's skull, rooting up through his brain and sinking in behind his eyes like a headache. A familiar one, lit by the filament glare that dangled in a cupboard beneath the stairs.
The feeling didn't build any further. Lukas rolled it over his tongue, and with a twitch of his shoulders, a shrug to himself, he wrote a note. 'That's good news. What's it got to do with Dumbledore though?'
Sometimes he even surprised himself with how little he felt.
The smirk that curved Jack's lips told all. "Who do you think sent the note? It's why I wouldn't use any magic. Old fuck's probably got wards all over the place, knowing him."
A loud groan broke from Lukas's throat. Like most of the rare noises that came out of Lukas, it startled Jack. His eyes flew up to Lukas's face, and a grin already twitched his lips as Lukas held up a hand and scribbled out a note. 'I don't even know what wards are. I need to learn some stuff ASAP.'
"Yeah, fuckin' right you do. Still can't believe it took you so long to start biting my goddamn hand off for it."
Lukas stuck up his middle finger and Jack laughed.
They threw some ideas back and forth for a little longer until the conversation petered off to yawns and long silences and Lukas misspelling words. With heavy eyelids and sleep lurking in his bones, Lukas shuffled to the edge of the bed, ready to put the light out, but Jack called him back. The call came quick and abrupt, as if it spat from Jack's tongue without him quite meaning it. Lukas frowned but sat back down.
Jack propped up on his elbow now and turned to look at Lukas. The light from above cast a warm glow on the high points of his brow and cheekbones, and the freckles there danced like little stars. A shame that a slow frown drew his brows together and interrupted the carefree way they could have capered around his face.
"Sorry," Jack sighed, "I just…" His fingers tugged through the side of his hair, catching on the knots and old gel. "Can I ask you something, kid?"
Great. They were being serious. 'Ask, though I may not answer.'
"Why don't you talk? You—I've never asked before, and you've never told me."
Lukas thinned his lips. Did he want to answer that? Obviously, Jack was asking for a better explanation than the one he gave Harry. He sort of … God, he sort of wanted to tell Jack. The nightmares, the memories, the little nails in his life – it all sat heavy on him. Sometimes, it left him behind – like he was normal, like he didn't have rot lurking beneath his skin – but when it came back…
Jack cared. Imagine being able to turn to him, not for help but just to know that he knew and that he wouldn't judge, because of course he wouldn't. He was Jack.
Lukas raised a single finger and set pen to paper. Stuttering, he fumbled through the words and no matter how … bland he twisted it, his breath caught in his chest and something on his skin crawled. Beneath it. Little bugs worming through his veins and gnawing at his tongue. The wrong of it.
But it'd be less wrong when he told Jack, wouldn't it? When Lukas had to stop, pen hovering blind above the page and each breath a torture to force out his lungs, Jack didn't speak. The grey of his eyes seemed to dance beneath the puckered frown while he watched Lukas, pale freckles all speckled across paler skin, and his sharp lips pursed, the rough chapped skin pressed together to overwhelm what was still pretty and untouched by the weather. His whole body leant toward Lukas, hand outstretched across the bed, but he didn't touch. Didn't speak. Only waited, his steady breaths the metronome for Lukas to cling to.
It was Jack. It was okay.
'I told you that on that day in the alley, I didn't know if I could speak. I wanted to test it out on my own but for some reason, I was scared that I'd try and nothing but a squeak or a rasp would come out. I didn't know if I was even born with the ability to speak - at this point I wasn't sure if I'd even been born at all – and I didn't know if I'd lost it some other way, and so weeks went by and no one really expected me to talk to them on the streets so I never said anything at all.
'Two months later, and the first, and only, man I talked to kidnapped me and did really bad things to me.
'I'd been trying to rob a shop. It was early days and I still had no idea how to do it. The shopkeeper caught me with a loaf of bread and some sausages under my coat and took me into the back room until the police arrived. If I'd been lucky, he would have actually called the police. They would've put me in juvy or in an orphanage, and my life might've got better – except I wouldn't be here right now – but when he started questioning me on my parents and I wouldn't reply, he must have guessed that I wouldn't answer because I didn't have any. He looked sympathetic, which I didn't like much, but he looked friendly and kind too. He said it was okay, that his parents died too and asked if I had somewhere safe to stay. I still remember the last bit, he said, "It's okay, you can talk to me."
'I told him I didn't; I was living on the streets. I remember smiling because I could speak, no matter how croaky my voice was, and I remember how quickly his expression changed. It almost seemed to slip off his face like oil. The new one made me sick, and that was that.
'He kept me for two months, locked up in his house. And it was horrible. I got these rope burn scars from being tied up so much, and I don't think I need to tell you everything else he did.
'He almost killed me at the end. It was … for hours, he paced around ranting and kept coming back and half-choking me then running off again. I guess he decided he couldn't do it, and no one would believe a little street urchin like me if I ever went to the police anyway, so he let me go. I knew that too and I never did.
'That's why I don't speak.'
Jack read through it three times and his face seemed to grow more expressionless each pass. The only thing that gave him away was the paper crumpling under his tightening grip. After the third time, he handed the page back to Lukas, got up, and walked out of the room.
Lukas's mouth dropped open as he watched him go. Oh, he'd thought he could trust Jack, had he? Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. A vice tightened around his skull, his chest, fracturing bone and rupturing flesh, and he choked. Couldn't breathe. Just left. Just like that. Without a single word. Without even fucking looking at him.
It was all too much.
His skull hammered. A stinging budded at his eyes and he couldn't breathe. Shouts and curses that he wouldn't ever utter formed on his lips and tears welled in his eyes. He spilt all of that and Jack just walked—
A roar filled the tiny apartment, then a loud, splintering crash. Another thud, crunch, and the muted sound of something hard pattering onto the carpet, drowned by another howl of rage. Lukas scrambled off the bed. His foot caught as he sprinted out the door and he nearly catapulted himself into the lounge. In the dark, Jack pulled his fist back to punch another hole in the wall.
Lukas dashed over, grabbed Jack's arm with both hands, and shoved him sideways. Jack staggered, turning to face Lukas, and the snarl on his face was savage and terrible. Lukas clapped both his hands onto Jack's solid chest then slapped him across the face.
A look of bewilderment softened Jack's features, and Lukas pointed at the gaping hole in the wall and drew a finger across his throat.
"I…" The fury rose on Jack's face again, twisting his lips. "He—"
Lukas slapped Jack again and shook his head. No. Don't you get angry. It's not yours to be angry about.
"Lucky." Instead of crimson rage, Jack's face this time cooled into iron. His jaw set to stone, and the knuckles of his clenched fists shone white. "I'm gonna kill him."
Lukas slapped him, shoved him backwards, hands planted high up on his bare chest. Jack nearly toppled this time, and Lukas jabbed a finger at him then pointed at the floor. Not waiting to see if Jack obeyed, he stalked back to the room and snatched up his notepad. His pen moved furiously across the page, scrawling out the words.
His palms smarted, the smacked skin pressing into the edges of the notebook in his trembling grip. The words on the page must have shuddered when he showed them to Jack.
'Don't you dare. He's mine to kill. MINE. If you kill him, you take that away from me, and if you do that then I will kill you.'
It was the only thing he had left. The only thing he could clutch at that somehow, someday he might steal back everything that had been torn away.
For a moment, the expression wiped off Jack's face, a hanging jaw and not much else, but only a moment, a heartbeat, a breath, then it all crumpled into a misery so deep it punched the breath out of Lukas's lungs.
Because Jack cared. It was all there: in the tears welling in his eyes, in the way his shoulders shook, in the hand lifted as if to take Lukas in his arms that fell just short.
"I'm sorry," Jack murmured. "I'll wait in the bedroom."
Once Lukas nodded – a sharp movement as if it might hide the way his lips trembled – Jack trudged off. With his eyes squeezed closed, Lukas dropped to the floor and bowed his head. The hands he rubbed over his face pulled at his skin and pinched the bare excess into little rolls that stung. The sting was good. It shoved back the grip on his lungs and dragged the Lukas of thought back into the physical while right now, his mind floated about two foot above his head, panting in desperation as it looked down.
It was the pain. Always, always, the pain put him back together again.
Lukas's eyes trailed to the kitchen, to the knife drawer, but the sight of Harry on the sofa arrested his feet before they could follow the trance.
The boy's white face peered over the arm of the sofa, blankets a hood over his head. Crap. One step forward, there, and a ten-minute car ride back.
Lukas wrote his note in large letters and held the pad up. 'I'm sorry. Jack gets a little angry on my behalf sometimes. He wouldn't have hurt you, don't worry.'
"H—He…" Harry didn't sound convinced. As his words trailed off, his eyes followed, drifting across to the side where… Lukas groaned. The bathroom door was missing, Only shards of wood clinging to the dangling hinges remained. Jack had evidently ripped it off the hinges and then … ah, chucked it across the room. The slice of light from the open bedroom door caught it where it slumped against the far wall, a wreckage, a ghost.
Lukas's hand twitched, begging for a knife handle to grip. He settled for pressing his fingers so deep into the column of the pen that the edges made blades in his fingertips.
'Go to sleep, Harry. Sorry for waking you.'
Harry nodded and slid back down out of sight. With a final sigh, Lukas returned to the bedroom and shut the door behind him.
The covers swallowed Jack in duck-egg blue up to his chest, his arms folded over the top. One hand twisted in the side of the hair and the other held the wrinkled page that Lukas had discarded on the bed. He didn't seem to be reading so much as staring. His eyes didn't move but he looked like he was absorbing something from the experience.
Shame the sight of it made Lukas's gut twist. The words seemed to burn through the back of the page, searing memory across his brain. It was hard to keep his breath even as he teased the note from Jack's fingers and, with a burst of magical heat, it turned to ash in his palm.
If only he could pull the memory out his skull and do the same.
Lukas slipped under the covers beside Jack, and they both shuffled around until they lay facing each other, just further than Jack's arm's reach apart. Lukas had claimed this side of the bed so that when he lay like this, he could write with his left hand.
'I didn't want that lying around.'
Jack nodded. "Fair enough."
No more words. All of Lukas's mind was dedicated to forcing his lungs to expand and contract, to breathe, and it made that time of silence and stillness pass as a blessing. He almost had his breathing working right when a movement from Jack drew his eyes – a hand reaching out.
He did it slowly, ponderously, such a care that there was no jerky, sudden movements that might make Lukas flinch away. Easy enough to see that was his intention, and that ridiculous frown on his face told Lukas just how much effort he made to do it.
Jack hadn't known why before, but he'd always accepted that Lukas didn't want to be touched. Usually, he just avoided any sort of 'touchy' gestures, so Lukas was wary but curious where this was going.
Just before the touch, the one that Lukas braced to flinch from, Jack's fingers stopped. They hovered a breath away, so close that the brush of his fingers across Lukas's cheekbone whispered there like a ghost, but it wasn't quite touching. Nothing more than an echo of displaced air. It was warm. Even not-touching, Jack exuded heat, and that heat made Lukas realise just how cold he'd always been. His eyes fluttered closed and a smile that echoed the swell of warmth in his chest spread across his lips. Hazy through the cage of Lukas's eyelashes, Jack smiled too.
"I had no idea, y'know," Jack murmured. "Not a fucking inkling. I never would have—"
Lukas shook his head, careful to move away from Jack's touch and not toward it, and placed a finger against his lips. He tightened his grip on the pen that hung lax between his fingers. 'That was the idea. I'm glad that you didn't think that had happened to me. If I were that pitiful a creature that anyone could guess it, then I'd hate it. Don't pity me, Jack. Please.'
The soft smile that curved Jack's lips took the edge of the stutter of Lukas's heart. Or perhaps it was all the emotion filling his grey eyes with the same light of the sun diffuse in a soft cover of cloud. Not one of those was pity. Maybe one was even pride.
"Never," Jack said, "I promise. You're brave, kid. Not pitiful. Not by a long fucking stretch." Slow, his fingers drawing back from Lukas's face, Jack shook his head. "You ain't really a kid in here, are you?" Jack tapped the side of his head. "Like I know you ain't an adult, that's stupid, but … not a kid either. You've never seemed like one, but now I guess it really wasn't me being a piece of shit ignoring it."
Lukas shrugged. Seeing Jack interact with Harry today had uncovered a … lack in the way he interacted with Lukas, but it also shone a light on everything more in the way he did. And Lukas was glad of that. God knew how awkward it would have felt if Jack had pandered to him that way. It made him realise that Harry had something that Lukas had always been missing being able to enjoy it.
'I don't know,' Lukas wrote to Jack, 'I don't remember what it feels like to be a child. I couldn't tell you.'
Smiling, Jack made the same feather-brush across Lukas's outstretched hand. It made his heart clench up, but like … in a good way. The same way as when he'd realised Jack had saved him from his old creep of a boss. That he was wanted enough for someone to try.
"Don't matter." Jack's voice was rough and throaty with emotion, the same feeling that suffused his whole face and trembled in his fingers. "You got more than that that no one else is ever gonna have. You got strength that's gonna make you fly, kiddo, just you wait.
"And…" Jack sighed, and the lowering mood made Lukas expect him to draw his hand back, but even though Jack's eyes trailed off to the ceiling, the almost-touch stayed, "y'know, I think I owe you a story now, something I've been dodging around…"
'Not now, Jack. I'm tired and feeling way too many emotions, and you're being too emotional and if you start crying, I'm going to have to go sleep with Harry.'
A laugh barked from Jack's lips, his eyes flying up to Lukas's face, and the shine in them said he was surprised by it. Gladdened. Grinning, Jack shook his head. "Not a fuckin' kid for sure. Jeez, you're cold, Lucky."
Lukas stuck out his tongue, rubbing his face into the scratchy fabric of the pillowcase. It kinda smelt. Probably needed changing. 'I want to hear. You've got to tell me now, but just … not right now. I want to sleep. My head hurts.'
Another laugh from Jack, this one low and soft and kind. "Alright." He rolled onto his back, tucking one arm beneath his head and smiled as he looked back to Lukas beside him. "Goodnight, kid."
Lukas waved his hand, blowing the single bulb that hung from the ceiling with a tiny surge of magic. Bulbs were cheaper than walls and doors, and Lukas knew neither of them wanted to get out of bed.
In the darkness, an urge rose in him. One that fought against the chains wrapped around the chest trapping his voice, and it fought hard enough that for just one moment, the lid popped open, just a crack. Lukas swallowed, whetting his throat, and whispered, "Goodnight, Jack."