His mother doesn’t make it to graduation, where he does so with honors, Slytherin badge puffed up and proud against his chest. He gets an entry level position at the Ministry, international affairs. It means taking a lot of notes and doing other people’s work. His father sends him owls on a regular basis, asking where he is, that they can’t avoid each other forever—they work in the same department, with the same people, the same area of the Ministry. Lorcan pushes his way through the workday like it’s coffin rehearsal.

Then he goes home at five o’clock sharp, and home is an empty space with Leo, who works long hours and doesn’t make it home until Lorcan’s getting ready to leave again. They give each other little salutes, but—he doesn’t worry. It’s not his job to worry. His job is to make sure case files are properly written up and filed away and to not stare at their matching toothbrushes perched on the sink in their only bathroom, wondering if Leo actually remembers to use his, and if he sees the way Lorcan keeps the cupboards in the kitchen stocked because he knows that he’s the only one that will deign to step foot in a grocery store so neither of them starves.

He thinks about leaving cellophane wrapped sandwiches in the fridge sometimes, but leaves before he actually does it. Leopold has a mother.

Lorcan is the one that needs taken care of, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to be taken care of like a broken thing. Because he’s not broken. He goes out in public with yesterday’s socks on, and grease stains on Wednesday’s slacks, but that’s all easily fixed by the flick of his wand.

Blood shot eyes and grubby faces are not as easily fixed.

Until he meets Elphie Whiteley, and snaps. It’s after he gets the stamp on his arm, makes this pledge he doesn’t doubt that he can keep. Nineteen years old, carrying a copy of Siddhartha (Hesse, 1951 and imported from America) that Leo got him as some sort of joke. “You need to unblock your chi—or, whatever. Take a spiritual journey. Ride some elephants in India.” He jangled open the door to the bookstore where the people knew him by name, and held up the book to show the owner.

“Bad joke.” Is the only explanation he offers when he slides it across the counter for the woman. She’s about seventy; creaky bones, ceramic rings on all ten of her fingers, white hair that can only be achieved when you’re that much closer to Heaven. “I got a new shipment in from Paris the other day. Some vendor going out of business that needs to get rid of all his copies of Bonjour Tristesse and Anna Karenina.”

He passes through displays of novels with crocodile mouths, and the new shelves stocked with The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Le Deuxième Sexe. Goes to the familiar place where he can be greeted by old friends, a brunette girl thumbing through a copy of some one hit wonder. He clears his throat. “You’re in my way.”

“Oh, sorry! I just got so absorbed by—” she checks the title of the book. “Sense and Senibility.” He’s read it. Doesn’t say so, but he has. The girl beams—“It’s wonderful, though I do feel for Marianne.”

Lorcan stares. She blushes—all the way down to the tips of her scuffed up pink shoes. “But I’ll get out of your way. Unless I can help you find something! I’m Elphie, by the way. Elphie Whiteley!”

“Lorcan,” he says, without a lot of enthusiasm, before reaching over her head for a Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, 1962 first printing with the acid colored cover) and tucking it under his arm. Her eyes follow him the whole time. “Is that one any good, Lorcan?”

“Sure.”

“Oh. What’s it about? Bird watching? I tried bird watching once, with my best friend Kit, but we scared all the birds away and it was boring, anyway. I kept forgetting the names of the birds! So it wasn’t very fun.” She’s babbling now, and trails behind him when he makes his way back to the front of the shop, giving a little wave to the owner while Lorcan makes his exchange. Then leaves. Expecting her to stay put.

She doesn’t. She follows him right out of the shop, fiddling with the beaded bracelets around her wrist.

He turns on his heel to face her. “Look, little girl. I didn’t come in to the book store wanting to make a friend, and I wasn’t looking to make a friend when you decided to strike up a conversation. You read Austen, for Merlin’s sake!”

“What does that have to do with anything? Also, I’m not a little girl, I’m fifteen years old.”

Lorcan chokes out a laugh. “You’re an infant. You’re barely out of diapers.”

She frowns. “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

“People,” he smiles, “aren’t nice. I happen to be one of the people that isn’t nice in the least. Do you understand?” Her turn to stare, now. “Apparently not. But I don’t have time to explain it to you. Good bye, little girl.”

He assumes this is the last time that he’ll see her—then a week later he goes back to the store, and she’s there again, flicking through Sense and Sensibility. He clears his throat, again. Reaches over her for a book again, gets followed out like a puppy, again. And the next time it happens just the same; the time after that, and the time after that time, too. It keeps happening like that for a month, and she asks him to have tea with her, and they talk. A real conversation. The type of conversation that can only take place between a fifteen—“sixteen,” she corrects him on the twentieth occasion that they meet and she asks him to tea—year old and an almost twenty year old.

“Where do you go to school, little girl? Or are you not in school?”

“It’s Elphie, Lorcan, and I do go to school. It’s a special school, though. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“Well, it’s in Scotland, see, a school for very, very, very special people—”

This is the first time she makes him laugh. “We have a school in common,” he says. Her eyes go all wide and she spills her tea over his new book in the process.

It’s then that he decides—he might like her. It’s then that the pangs in his chest are deciphered, and Leo says he’s acting weird. Coming home smiling—“glowing, even. Are you pregnant?” and Lorcan has to sit in his room stamping down the feelings that keep running rampant inside of him. It takes him a while to work up the courage to do something about them. When she’s eighteen, and he doesn’t feel so bad about having the dreams where he tangles his hands in her hair and their mouths meet like magnets. He might have read an Austen or two (the annotated version ofPride and Prejudice that she sent him for his twenty first birthday, the copy ofEmma with the underlined passages he’d bought in secret six months ago).

He buys her an ice cream cone in Diagon Alley, walks beside her with his hands in his pockets. She’s talking about something and he’s not paying attention because he keeps thinking about what it’d be like to maybe link their fingers together or tell her, just tell her that he can’t stop thinking about her, that it’s bad because of what he does when they’re not together. That he’s watched people, people like her, scream when they’re hit with beams of red light—he’s done it himself. Got sick all over his shoes after and blamed it on a bad meal.

Being part of this—the revolution—has meant proving himself. In ways that would have made his mother cry.

Elphie licks a lump of sprinkles from her ice cream while they’re standing behind the shop. “Are you sure you don’t want some of this, Porky?” and he doesn’t even give her that look that he normally does when she uses that stupid, stupid nickname. A sprinkle’s stuck itself to her upper lip, a little Marilyn mole, and he leans over to lick it off.

She drops the rest of her ice cream in the dirt.

And he laughs and laughs and laughs because god, “I like you.” The look on her face is a lot like the one girls get when boys say stuff like this. She steps in the slow puddle of sweet stuff spreading around them in the process of wrapping her arms around his shoulders and looking up at him. “I like you too. I like you an awful lot. You’re my Frogdarcy! Y’know, like the frog you kiss to turn into a prince and Darcy like—” she’s silenced by him kissing her again. He’s kissed plenty of girls before; put his hands up their skirts, left bruises on their throats, bite marks on their thighs.

Kissing Elphie is different, because it’s just that—kissing.

It’ll take a lot more courage before he says he loves her. But he does. Fuck, he does.