Title: Oh To Dream, Oh To Sleep
Challenge Entry for:
forever_dreaming's Domesticity Challenge on HPFT.
The Houses Competition, Year Two, Round Three.
House: Hufflepuff
Year: 5th
Category: Short
Prompt: [Character] Gideon Prewett, [Action] Sleeping, [Weather] Tornado
Wordcount: 1910 (Google Docs)
Beta readers: Aya, Trish. Thanks, y'all!
"Get up! It's half past noon already. You're such a loafer!"
"I'm up," Gideon said groggily, still in a horizontal position on his cot. He saw the scowl on his brother's face, hovering inches closer than was comfortable. He sneezed in Fabian's face out of spite as he shoved his brother in the chest and rolled off the cot in one swift motion. His brother trailed behind him as he wandered into the kitchen.
"You're going to the meeting tonight?" Fabian asked, a half-step behind him.
"Of course."
"Because last time, you missed it."
"Not gonna miss it, Fabian." Gideon used that clipped tone of voice that made his brother leave him alone.
"I'm hungry," he snapped, before Fabian could say something else that ruffled him, and proceeded to bang around under the kitchen sink.
"What's your problem?" Fabian shot back a few minutes later, and out of context.
Gideon decided that he didn't want to figure out what Fabian meant by that. Instead, he made a rude gesture with his hand and with his other had pulled out a large cooking pot, one of those heavy, steel things that was so shiny he could use it as a mirror to, say, slick back his hair after rolling out of bed. He banged the pot on the counter next to the sink and ran the water. Just for show, he stuck his head under the tap and then flung his head back, just in time for Fabian to get too close to him again.
"Watch it!"
"Yeah, I see it." Gideon hadn't turned around to see his brother's shirt spattered with droplets of water, too busy peering at his reflection and smoothing his hair over the top of his head.
"You're not going to sleep through the meeting again, are you?"
Gideon, satisfied with his hair, finally faced his brother, who had put on a Muggle overcoat and rain galoshes. It didn't look like rain, and the overcoat was more curious because it was two sizes too large than merely being a Muggle outfit in a Wizarding house. Any way he looked at it, Fabian was dressed ridiculously.
"You're not wearing that in public, are you?" he shot back, knowing full well that Fabian had nothing else Muggle-ish to wear, and if he didn't leave right now, he'd be late.
Fabian scowled. "You know what?" he started in, waving a pointed finger in the air, and then he deflated. "Never mind. I don't have time for this. Some of us have work to do."
He left with a slam of the door.
Gideon pressed the heels of his hands into the side of the sink and watched the water spill into the pot. He knew that Fabian was overtired, overworked and felt the strain of the Order's missions day in and day out. He knew that it didn't help when, every time Fabian came home, Gideon was sleeping, or just waking up, or about to go to bed. It made Fabian think that was all Gideon was doing: sleeping and waking, and then sleeping again.
There wasn't anything to be done about that. The fact was, that while Fabian's Order missions consisted of gathering intel by diving into rubbish bins, counting pedestrians and calculating the daily schedules of shopkeepers, Gideon's time was spent pinning longitude and latitude to maps and dangling a crystal on a string over the crossroads.
Scrying took a lot out of a person. It made him dizzy and unfocused, and also very tired.
The really bad part was that he couldn't tell his brother anything about it. If he did, Fabian's observations would be skewed, and the scrying results would be null and void.
Most of the time, Gideon's scrying reports to the Order were blank, which was exactly what the Order wanted. On the off chance that he actually would find something, they'd have to scrap the location for whatever mission they were planning and pick a new one. Any Order mission was risky enough, and it was Gideon's job to make sure that they didn't walk into a situation where they were predetermined to fail.
He'd finished the scrying and was taking a well-earned rest when his brother had so rudely woken him up from his first dreamless sleep in a week. It crossed his mind to dig the map and the crystal out from under his cot to run the process once again, just to be sure. But he was already dead on his feet, and an hour wasn't enough time to run the spells and clean up the flat before Fabian returned.
And Merlin, he had to eat. Living on the edge, practically in hiding themselves, had its disadvantages. Right now, that disadvantage happened to be the gnawing pit at the bottom of his stomach.
The water sloshed back and forth in the pot, threatening to jump right out onto the stove as he hefted it in place over the burner. Gideon aimed his wand, spun the gas controls, and lit the flame. Then he rummaged in the cabinets until his found something that looked like food. His sister had come over a week ago and stocked their pantry, and he trusted her judgment. Not reading past "add water and let boil for thirty minutes", he tore open the package, poured the contents into the pot, and tossed the crumpled plastic aside. Then, with a swish of his wand, he put together a timed sleep spell and aimed for the top of his head.
Sparks danced behind his eyes while he rolled his cot. Immediately, it felt like he was laying in a great big cradle, rocked back and forth by a tropical island breeze.
"Blimey, this spell is aces! Half an hour more, and I'll be right as rain," he mumbled to himself. He just hoped that was long enough so he could wake up and eat before Fabian returned. Sometimes, even the rain was wrong, according to Fabian.
Something was wrong with the flat.
A dark cloud hung in the air right over the place where Fabian and his brother lived. He shuffled in his ill-fitting galoshes through the bone-dry streets to get to the door.
"Gideon?"
The only sound that welcomed him was the rapid bubbling of the pot on the stove. Strangely, there was a slight breeze inside, even with the windows closed. He'd thought that Gideon had broken their electric fan, but maybe not.
"Gideon?" he called again.
Then the wind outside started to howl.
"Funny," Fabian said, "there wasn't any weather just a moment ago."
Suddenly, the kitchen curtains started whipping around. A plastic wrapper hit Fabian in the face. It had a picture of a dark cloud on it, and some crumpled lettering, but that was all he could make out before it was ripped out of his hands by another gust of wind.
The bubbling pot made hissing noises. Froth splashed with a steamy splatter all over the stove.
Then the floor began to shake.
"Gideon, what the he…"
Fabian's words were cut off when the roof tore right off their flat. He barely scrambled over to the wall to grip the old pipes of a Muggle heating unit they'd never used. The door between the kitchen area and the bedroom flapped open and closed so violently that it broke off its hinges and lifted into the air. He watched it fly up into a yawning maw of blackness above him.
Fabian stared, dumbfounded as he remembered the description of one of Gideon's nightmares when they were children. There were two kinds of dreams that his brother had: the ones that he told everyone about that were silly and frivolous, and the ones that he only shared with Fabian. The former were funny and made everyone laugh at him, including Fabian. The latter bristled with cautionary warnings, and were more apt to come true. It was a mystery to Fabian how, between the ages of nine and eleven, his brother had gotten any sleep at all, never knowing which dreams would plague him from night to night.
Later, Gideon had always been drawn to Divination in school, while Fabian had teased his brother about having any interest in a subject where one trusted tea leaves over Transfiguration. But Gideon never let his brother's disdain stop him from studying the art. Fabian could never imagine why someone as smart as his brother would be drawn to the very thing that used as little common sense as possible to come up with the least likely answers one could dream of.
He had all but forgotten about the childhood dreams and premonitions until that very moment when one of them was literally threatening to swallow him whole.
Still grasping the iron heater, Fabian looked through the open doorway to where his brother lay, seemingly at peace, while the world around him threatened to rip them apart. Fabian tried to call out, but his voice sounded dull and far away to his own ears. There was no way for him to reach his brother, without getting sucked up into the vortex of black above him, just like that door.
Then, as if it couldn't get any worse, he watched in horror as the howling winds sucked his brother right off the cot and up into that swirling darkness.
There was nothing else he could do except yell for his brother, some silent, raw, throaty effort for the winds to bring him back. He was so dumbfounded that he couldn't even form thoughts in his head. He didn't even know where his wand was.
The windows blew out. Cabinet doors violently slapped open and shut. Hand-me-down dishes flew off the shelves and crashed into each other. The pot, still boiling, rose up and zoomed by, narrowly missing Fabian's head as it got sucked up into the sky. The four legged table spun round and round, barely lifting off. Fabian curled his legs as close to his body as possible, and prayed that he would make it out alive.
If Gideon had foreseen this so very long ago, had he remembered it? Fabian didn't recall if his brother had said what happened after the gaping maw of wind appeared. He only remembered that Gideon was frightened and couldn't sleep for a week afterwards.
After this, Fabian might not ever sleep again either.
The screams. The roaring wind. The clanking.
Then, deadly silence.
The black cloud lifted upwards, spiraling into nothingness, and in its place, miraculously, Gideon's body floated down, landing softly on the mattress.
A loud crack shattered the eerie silence. The kitchen table had landed hard, its four legs collapsed underneath.
There was an inexplicable soft "bing" from somewhere.
Gideon bolted upright in bed, and a whistling sound from above had them both looking up.
The large steel pot landed with a loud clunk onto the top of the broken table, hot water sloshing all over the place. A tattered piece of plastic wrapper floated by, and Fabian snatched it out of the air.
Trembling, he mouthed the words, "Tornado Stew" and sighed heavily.
Gideon's head swiveled around to take in the trashed flat, and then groggily stared at his brother. He lifted the wrapper from Fabian's shaking hand and read the fine print, "When you're in mortal peril and famished at the same time…"
They both looked at the pot, and then at each other.
Gideon shrugged. "Supper's ready."