Life in Black and White
Chapter Three
"Hestia! You home?" he called, already pounding on her bedroom door.
"Yeah, come in!" she yelled back, shoving the end of the ice cream cone into her mouth.
The door popped open and Sturgis' yellow-thatched head poked in. "You eaten yet?" he asked.
Hestia chewed the remains of the ice cream cone, and then shook her head. "No, you have something in mind?"
"Some friends wanted to venture into muggle London for some good Chinese. You interested?"
Hestia was about to throw out an emphatic yes—the one takeaway in Diagon was horrendously bad and she hadn't had good Chinese since she'd visited her sister in Cardiff—when the thought struck. "What should I wear? I don't have any muggle clothes."
Sturgis laughed, already heading down the hall back to the door. "What you have on, minus the robes. Nice trousers, respectable shirt and waistcoat—you'll do all right." Hestia looked down, disappointed. All these wardrobes full of pretty things to wear and the first chance she had to go out and wear whatever she wanted, to go out not wearing work clothing…work clothing was the only appropriate garb. Figured.
She grabbed one of the handbags down off the shelf—at least she had an occasion to carry one of those and not her huge work bag. The scarlet leather picked up the tiny red pinstripes running through the grey silk of her waistcoat and perfectly matched the spindly red spike heels hidden under her long grey trousers. "Have you got any muggle money?" she screamed at Sturgis through their sound-killing plaster walls, digging her pocketbook out of her work bag.
"Yeah," he roared back at her.
"Okay!" She tossed the pocketbook filled with galleons and knuts into the handbag anyway, and her wand after it—she might not really need the bag, but she was going to carry it and she preferred not to carry it empty; it felt strange and too light on her shoulder.
She did make a mental note, though; on her next day off, whenever it came, she was changing out some money at Gringotts and going shopping in Muggle London. Somehow, the thought had never occurred to her before. Despite the rather obvious fact that she lived in Muggle London, she rarely ventured any farther than the little alleyway behind their place to Apparate to Diagon or the Ministry. The next time Sturgis' friends came around wanting to wander around Muggle London, she was going to have just the outfit for the occasion.
"You'd better be able to keep up in those stupid shoes," Sturgis muttered, casting a filthy glance at her feet. "We're walking."
"I'm fine!" Hestia frowned. Men didn't appreciate anything pretty, did they? "I worked all day in them, why shouldn't I be fine now?"
He shook his head as he locked and warded the door behind them. "Your feet must be deformed, walking around in those all day. Oh, and I put a few more wards on the door, I'll teach you the counters when we get home."
Hestia opened her mouth to defend her feet, but the part that followed drew her attention. "More wards?" she asked, a frown creasing her brow. "What do we need those for? That flat is already warded better than my parents' house, and they're paranoid."
"Just being cautious; I see too much at work," he said, his grin a little forced. Hestia didn't want to push it; and when were more precautions ever a bad thing?
"Okay," she acquiesced. "We meeting Gideon?"
"And Fabian and Maggie…Gideon's younger brother and one of his friends," Sturgis explained, jumping down the steps two at a time like an overgrown kid. Hestia rolled her eyes and primly kept pace behind him, her heels clicking on the concrete with that specific, high-heel sound she still enjoyed a little more than was strictly normal.
"Girlfriend?" Hestia asked, her voice a play at neutrality. Gideon was really good-looking, if something of a stick-in-the-mud who didn't particularly like her overmuch; a younger brother sounded promising.
Sturgis laughed at her. "Not Maggie, but Fabian's a useless pursuit."
"Claimed property, eh? Oh, well!" she said lightly, meaning it.
The trio was waiting for them at the corner, the smallest figure waving greetings when they first recognized Sturgis by his thatch-yellow hair and Ministry-appropriate trousers and shirt.
Gideon spared a smile for Hestia and introduced the other two. Fabian was, in terms of pure physical looks, the kind of man Hestia tended to fancy. Sharply defined good looks, smart-looking wire-rimmed spectacles, an easy grin. But then her gaze travelled to his rumpled shirt, the creased pants, the vague touch of casual disarray that cooled her interest substantially. He bid her a friendly 'hello' and expressed a vague familiarity with her name that he couldn't quite place.
Maggie bid her a bright, cheerful hello. If Fabian was casual disarray, the tiny girl beside him was rave chaos. Maggie was the kind of tiny, bird-like thin that, at first glance, Hestia deeply envied and, at second, really didn't. There were dozens of mismatched bangles on each wrist, her plain brown hair was striped with chunks of platinum blonde and vibrant pink, and the black t-shirt she was wearing with jeans had a neon advertisement on it for something called (rather inappropriately, Hestia thought) The Sex Pistols.
Hestia had expected better from the only member of the group who wasn't pureblooded—the outfit seemed to scream—but five minutes after they left the corner behind, it became clear that Maggie's outfit, far from being a stark anomaly, was not that uncommon and certainly not the worst of what Muggle fashion seemed to offer. That didn't stop Hestia from finding the effect offensively ugly, as cute as Maggie might be underneath the mess.
The three men sectioned themselves off in front, walking a bit too fast to be accidental and talking quietly to themselves.
"Boys' club, eh?" Maggie joked, falling in step beside her. Hestia laughed.
"I think it's more of a 'not-Hestia' club, but you have enough manners to not let me walk alone." She cast a playfully mean look at the three back a few steps ahead of them.
Maggie laughed, a snickery sort of bird-trill. "Let's see how far they get before they remember I'm the only one who knows where we're going."
It took them a while, too, the three heads bent together, occasionally taking a random right turn when an intersection met their path. Maggie and Hestia giggled to themselves. Finally, though, when fifteen minutes later none of them seemed any more inclined to look up and realize they didn't know where they were going, Maggie muttered to Hestia, "Well, I suppose I best stop them now before we end up in Wandsworth."
The restaurant was, truthfully, not too terribly far from where they were, a fact that the three men grasped onto with obnoxious fervor.
"Innate sense of direction, us men," Sturgis crowed proudly, attacking his Kung Pao shrimp with awkwardly-held chopsticks. Fabian and Gideon nodded wordlessly, both of their mouths full. Maggie picked around her chow mein with a fork, forgoing the chopsticks all together, shaking her head.
"Yeah, sure," she said scathingly. "Like that Y chromosome, in addition to endowing you with a cock, rolled up a grand map of the universe inside it."
Hestia cringed to herself at the crass language. She didn't quite understand what a 'whycromizone' was—probably something Muggle—and she was reasonably certain, as well, that Sturgis, Fabian, and Gideon didn't know either, but they nodded agreement anyway. "Exactly," Fabian grinned, pointing a plastic fork at Maggie. "Right in one."
Hestia didn't feel quite so out of place during dinner, sitting around the scrubby table with the four of them. She did catch, though, a few sort of censoring looks between the others, always followed by a quickly ended line of conversation and a shiny clean new topic to start on, like they were afraid of saying too much in front of her. There was still definitely an air of the tag-along; though Maggie and Sturgis tried valiantly to include her in everything, Hestia never got far into a sentence without feeling the heavy weight of Gideon's disapproving glare on her. It was more than enough to staple her tongue to the roof of her mouth; she let the others carry most of the conversation, keeping most of her opinions to herself and her mouth closed.
Gideon did not like her. It was an almost novel experience for Hestia, to be disliked in such a way. Most people she knew liked her well enough, or were polite enough to act like they did. Gideon didn't. Didn't like her, didn't pretend to. Hestia'd got it out of Sturgis when he came home from the pubs one night off his face that Gideon found her too brash, too friendly, too loud, too shallow… 'a vain waste of a fine mind' Sturgis had helpfully quoted for her as she put him to bed, though more poorly enunciated.
Hestia tried to dislike him back, but she rather found she couldn't. There was nothing particular about him to dislike except his disregard for her--she would have liked him if he'd liked her, certainly, and since when was it a crime to dislike someone? He was never anything less than polite to her--he just had absolutely no time or patience for anything to do with her.
It was enough to feel included in the conversation, even though she chose to sideline herself for most of it. It felt normal, a nice departure from her usual evening of solitude and study and Sturgis.
And then, out of nowhere and looking entirely wrong in the context of the dingy, empty muggle restaurant on an unremarkable side street in muggle Clapham, a small silver gazelle cantered through the wall and, to Hestia's dumbfounded surprise, started speaking in Juriswitch Meadowes' voice. She was strangely certain for half a moment that she was experiencing the latent effects of some stress-related breakdown, a few hours after the fact, until she noticed that the rest of them had gone silent as well, all attention turned.
"Diagon, NOW!" it cried, and Hestia looked at it, her jaw frozen open and the chunk of lemon-peel chicken she had between her chopsticks fell to the floor unnoticed.
Everyone around her looked grim, their food and seats already abandoned. Hestia felt at odds, frozen to her seat and looking up at Sturgis for direction, the chopsticks in her hand still suspended midair and her mouth still sightly open. "We have to go, Hestia," Sturgis told her, as gently as he could when his voice was full of urgency.
"Okay…" Hestia said vaguely, still not quite up to speed.
Sturgis took her gently by the shoulders. "Can you make sure no one around here saw that? And then go home. Do you hear me, Hestia? Go home. Lock up the wards behind you, and stay there!"
She shook herself, focusing. "Yeah, yeah. I can do that, okay." The others were already gone, and Sturgis popped out a second after releasing his hold on her. She didn't accompany them, it didn't even occur to her to offer.
The teenage girl who'd taken their order wandered out a few moments later, looking entirely unconcerned. Hestia found this sufficient evidence that no one had seen anything. She left the takeaway, removing her wand from her handbag and tucking it up her sleeve, at the ready but not readily visible to the muggles she passed in the street.
She'd already walked halfway home when it occurred to her to Apparate; the muggle streets were unfamiliar and it was getting dark, and the click-tap of her heels seemed to echo loudly on the asphalt. She was also attracting some unwanted attention; some Muggle men had leered and catcalled as she walked by. And, though she would never in a hundred thousand lifetimes admit it, her feet were starting to hurt.
She ducked into a convenient alleyway and Apparated to the stairwell of her building. It was only as she ascended the steps that she remembered the new wards Sturgis had put on the flat—the wards she didn't know how to unlock yet.
Hestia, her mind a good deal clearer given the walk through the cool spring air, weighed her options carefully. Sturgis had told her to stay here, but he'd been assuming that meant indoors and protected by the numerous charms on the place. Maybe she ought to Apparate somewhere else; Juno's in Cardiff, her parents' in Conwy, or even maybe just to Alice's over in Southwark. Those were probably the more reasonable options, but Hestia was worried about Sturgis. Waiting here for him to come home and worrying wasn't really much, but it was better than leaving and worrying.
She didn't wait long; not twenty minutes later, Sturgis stumbled up the stairway, looking much wearied in such a short amount of time. "What the hell are you doing out here?" he yelled at her, stopping short as his eyes fell on her sitting barefoot on the dirty floor opposite their front door.
"You put those new wards up and I didn't know how to undo them," Hestia explained, struggling upright and picking her shoes up from where they sat neatly lined up against the wall. "And I'm all right, really."
"Oh," he said simply, his indignation and slight anger deflating. "Here, let me show you."
Five minutes later, Hestia bustled around their kitchen, preparing some tea things while Sturgis sat at the table. Hesitantly, she spoke. "I suppose I shouldn't ask what all that was." It was a statement, really, but there was an invitation underneath.
Sturgis was quiet. "Yeah, thanks," he said finally, eyes glued onto the table top.
"It's nothing," Hestia demurred. "If I recall," she said lightly, affecting a cheeriness she couldn't quite feel when Sturgis was so heavily quiet, "I owe you that favor, you listened to me the other night. Consider that debt struck from our records."
"So stricken," Sturgis replied, a slow half-smile spreading across his face. Hestia set the mug down in front of him, tea with milk and enough sugar that her teeth ached in sympathy. On a strange impulse—because she generally wasn't the touchy sort who gave hugs on any random occasion as Sturgis liked to—she wrapped her arms around him and set her chin on his shoulder, bent down over him as he sat at their table. He seemed to settle into the gesture, tilting his head against hers.
After a moment, she clapped him on the shoulder, drawing away. "You'll be happy to know I'm going to bed now; no studying of any sort!" she said brightly, moving back to the counter to put the teabags and sugar packet away.
"Really?" He looked sceptic. "It's not even nine thirty."
"Yeah, really!" she said, playing offended at his disbelief. "I've had my services sold out to the Selwyn case, and they've got me reading court precedent after court precedent. I was a little tired today and I started going cross-eyed at about four. Intense reading does not mix well with drowsiness."
He got quiet again when she mentioned the Selwyn case, and Hestia wondered if she'd maybe said the wrong thing.
"You'll be careful with that, won't you?" It was quiet, worried, but ultimately hesitant, as if he wasn't sure he should say anything. He looked up at her from where he'd been staring into his tea.
"With the intense reading?" Hestia asked, still playfully, but she knew he meant something worse than that. "Yeah, I'll be sure not to permanently cross my eyes, as attractive as that would make me."
"Yeah, you never know what dangers lurk for you in ancient law books." He smiled slightly, still a little heavy around his eyes.
"Yeah, yeah," Hestia replied, trying to shake off the strange, uncomfortable feeling Sturgis' words had left her with.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd gone to bed at such a reasonable hour. Crawling into bed, the thought occurred to her that maybe she ought to try it more often; the satin of the duvet slid nicely against her violet silk nightgown and the cool cotton of her sheets felt like heaven and she wasn't counting down on one hand how many hours until she had to get up.
She had a particularly lovely dream, as well, though it did make it completely impossible not to burn a blush across her cheeks when she went in to the office the next morning to have Caradoc Dearborn, already working with Daniel on something or other, look up and wish her a good morning with such a friendly, handsome smile on his face.
I am back to school. If the first few days are anything to go by, I am no longer going to be Miss Speedy on updates. I have a life. And stuff to do. No, seriously. I barely remember what that's like, but I'm getting a crash-course re-education. Rest assured, I'm still working on stuff. The next part of Magic is started, as is the next part of this. The next chapter of The Spare Princess is kicking my ass, though, in terms of refusal to be written down. I can't seem to get started--the ideas are there, but I can't quite seem to catch hold of them. Blah.
Anyway, please review! It's the most powerful tool you have available, in terms of getting the next chapter out asap! Enable my schoolwork procrastination!