The Almost Date

Jack had remembered that tonight was the night she settled her debt and went out to dinner with Albus Potter, but she had conveniently forgotten about the whole... dress thing until it was absolutely necessary. She was worried that if she thought about it too much, she'd end up in too fancy of a dress. A last minute dress would be the answer, right? Unfortunately, this just added a shade of stress to the ordeal that Jack had been hoping to avoid entirely. Still, all her preparations (and lack thereof) still found her in a dire situation.

Her female manager, Kirsty, had actually come over to her house, bringing every dress she owned with her. Good ol' Kirsty. Kirsty was a very tall woman, so all long dresses were immediately counted out. The least offensive one to Jack came with matching tights and heels. Jack decided on the dress and tights but subbed in some ankle-high boots in place of the heels. Albus should have no reason to complain. She looked pretty miserable, even in this minimal get-up.

To add insult to injury, Kirsty even pulled Jack's hair up, something Jack only knew how to do if it was put in a very hasty clip. Sunny was bounding about her the entire time, laughing openly as her aunt was tortured - the little six-year-old sadist. Jack finally shooed Sunny off to go bother Max who, as far as Jack knew, didn't even know Jack was going out. But it was alright. Max was sort of homebound; she doubted he had plans for the night.

It was just about time for Albus to arrive, so Jack poured herself a small glass of wine, just something she could sip at, before abandoning it for a beer. She sat herself down and patiently waited, trying to do her best not to tug at the dress.

Four and a half.

Four and a half successful relationships: of arranging candle-lit dates, of buying thoughtful gifts, of being everything what an ideal boyfriend was supposed to be, chivalrous, caring (if somewhat withdrawn)......and Albus had never been more bloody nervous.

It wasn't even.....that, for Merlin's sake. That. The D-word. And even if it was, it was no sane reason for Albus to spend the better part of an hour staring into a mirror. We're Potters, James would say, with an obnoxiously smug grin. We don't need to prepare to impress people.

But impressing was not the main criteria here. No, it wasn't a criterion at all, Albus quickly amended inside his head. The main thing was giving the right idea. Or to be more specific, to avoid giving the wrong one. Which would be that this was a.....that. You know. That.

Albus stared at himself in the mirror, again. A forest green dress shirt, offset by grey slacks and pointed loafers. His hair was looking dark and mussed, emerald eyes glinting behind rectangular, black-framed glasses. He rolled up the sleeves till his elbows, undid a button or two. Casual, yet classy. Especially because of the glasses.

He pointedly forgot (ignored) the fact that he didn't really need them except while reading.

He walked. The wind was fresh, cold; and Albus began walking down the road with an easy stride, feeling his shoulders relax. The night was crisp, with the scent of summer rain in the air, just after a downpour. The cars hooted and honked, people talked and laughed, and Albus started feeling considerably better. Until he was crossing the road, and a woman passed him by, and he turned his head in spite of himself. Short, averagely pretty, red hair.

F*** walks. Albus ducked into the nearest alley and Disapparated.

He emerged on her doorstep, barely maintaining his balance. Raised his hand to the door, put it in his pocket again. Looked up at the sky. 

"I like blonds." Albus said aloud. "With blue eyes."

Feeling stupid (a rather familiar feeling now), and also highly relieved, he knocked on the door.

((I laughed. Good post))

"Ahem!"

Jack turned to see Sunny with her head poked around the corner to peer into the cramped little kitchen. She scrunched her nose. "You look like a girl." 

Jack glared at her. "I am a girl, Sunny."

Sunny frowned. "I don't like it."

"No ostriches."

"Noooo!" she shrieked, wheeling around and running off, sure to tell Max. Jack couldn't help it. Sometimes it was funny to mess with Sunny a bit. Jack was sure psychological torture was part of child-rearing. Of course, she always lightened up on Sunny. She really could not help it.

She sighed and stood, looking about her. She sighed and took a drink, leaning against the counter, when she heard a knock. She stood up and put the beer down. She quickly stooped to check that her wand and wallet were indeed tucked into her boot, the butt of her wand protruding a bit, though both were safely secured by magic.

No other reason to dawdle, she stood and sighed, approaching the door, ready for snide comments. She threw the door open, stepped outside, and closed the door behind her.

"Let's get this over with," she said, as dramatically as she could pull off.

(( Thank you  )

The moment she opened the door, Albus realised that he had never seen Jack look so.....awkward. Out of her skin.

Her well-toned arms looked at odds with the girly dress, her feet out of place in the definitely-stylish tights and boots. Her green eyes darted left and right uncomfortably, unwilling to meet his gaze. 

With not a small amount of relief, Albus crossed out 'butterflies' , 'cliche compliments and analogies' and 'heart skips a beat' off his mental list. Du Hunt was wrong. Hell wrong. Jack wasn't anything special. She was just Jack. He, quite frankly, admitted to himself that he had seen better-looking people.

He stepped inside the door, turned around, blatantly looked at Jack from head to toe and quipped, "You almost convinced me of your gender."

Then his eyes fell on her boots. The right one, to be particular. Her wand was poking out of it. Like she was prepared, going into war.

Albus's eyes rose to her face. Damn. She was going to war, wasn't she? Albus felt comfortable, calm, confident in his attire. This was his field, his scene, his battleground. Not hers. She was stepping out of her comfort zone, her skin. She probably felt uneasy and out of place, but she was still doing it for his whims and fancies. Most people wouldn't even care.

Albus smiled, and his chest felt warm. "But you clean up well, Dyllan."

He extended his right arm, for the Side-Along Apparition. "Shall we?"

So far, Jack thought this night might actually be possible, something she might just survive. Jack hoped they could just continue in this fashion, this back and forth of jokes and taunts. This was something Jack could handle and potentially find comfort in. She might even forget what was so terrible about this whole ordeal and be able to enjoy herself if they could focus on making fun and keeping it all light.

She stepped down the few stairs on her doorstep and looked back at her friend, grinning slyly as she said, "I'll keep you guessing, yet." Right, Jack. That made sense. Tell him you might be a man. Great way to make and keep friends. She shook it off. She couldn't help her tendency to act like a... well, like a weirdo. It seemed to be a natural, inescapable part of her personality. Plus, when did she start caring what people thought?

She shifted. "Yeah, but clean is lame. I'd compliment you, but I don't think I should since I'm your hostage for the night." She smirked, grabbing his arm nevertheless.

“Hostage for the night. I like the sound of that.”

They stepped out into the night, and Disapparated.

And reappeared in a…….field.

Albus walked ahead, his soled boots crunching on the grass, not needing to look back to know that Jack was surprised. She had been expecting…..expecting…….well, whatever she had been expecting, it surely couldn’t be this. Probably a restaurant (poncy, his mind supplied) with glass doors and polished floors, floors of the kind that made you reluctant of even walking on them, for the fear of leaving a stain. Probably waiters with tiny black bows, and courteous manners, and thick French accents. Probably a long five-course meal, with scallops and crème brulee , in the duration of which Jack would twitch, and rub the back of her neck, and tug at her dress, and be all in all so suffocated and uncomfortable that the entire night would turn out to be a nightmare.

This was a field. A large, open, expanse of green; so vast that Albus could pretend he was at the fringes of civilization, if he so wished. He had wished it too, several times in the past, no more so than when Uncle George had first brought him here. It had been his fourteenth birthday party, and he had been buried in the couch, staring at faces in the fire. Then he had been jerked unceremoniously up, had felt a spinning sensation in his stomach, and a moment later was left stranded in an unknown place. Albus had stood there motionless for several seconds, and as eyes were wont to do, they fixated on the one feature that dotted the empty landscape. The summerhouse.

Truthfully, it was more like a gazebo, yet it lacked the distinctly flowery quality that all such structures possess. It was night, and the summerhouse was cloaked in shadow; yet he found himself walking up the steps in a trance-like state, watching the granite and marble pillars, seeing the depthless sea waves crash away on the cliff at the precipice of which the summerhouse had been constructed. The voice of the sea seemed to drown out all sounds at first, but then he heard it. Them. And it was that to which Albus kept returning.

It was a constant, murmuring, ever-present sound, indescribable and stretching out into the distance the way the voice of a seashell did. Sometimes high, sometimes low, the tempo would rise and fall, sometimes loud enough to send goosebumps skittering over Albus’s skin, sometimes faint enough to lull him to sleep. And sleep he did, wide-eyed, for hours and hours, to the sound of the never-ceasing orchestra. Albus never cared to investigated it, to understand or analyse the reasons behind it. It would have lost its magic, then.

Sometimes he would simply sit, sit on the ground with his back digging into the dew-drenched grass, feeling the rain drizzle down. He would look up into the vast night sky and see lightning, bright, bright lightning, too far away to hear its sound. It was satisfying, to see things break and rend and tear, without it happening to him. Satisfying to hear the voices climb, higher and higher, till they drowned out even the sound of his heartbeat, and Albus felt glad. He never came during the morning though. That would have broken the magic too.

Present day Albus walked, slow and silent, up the stairs and into the summerhouse. His eyes scoped over it all: over the tumultuous sea, over the Conjured will-o-wisp flitting here and there, casting its light scantily on the table placed in the centre, with two chairs. There were two empty glasses, two plates, one laden with a complex swirl of colours and flavours and ingredients. The other was ceramic and white. Nestled right in the centre, was a big, greasy, gloriously unhealthy, meaty and drizzled with spicy sauces…….hamburger.

Jack smirked and took his arm, and they immediately twisted into the air, hurtling into the vacuum of time and space that would deliver them to the location - Jack was assuming they were heading to Eli's or something of that caliber. She always overheard Kristy talking about heading to Eli's for a night out on the town, so it was the only standard Jack's mind could really jump to. She was not exactly excited to arrive, and she almost briefly considered taking control of the apparation and changing direction.

And when they landed, she briefly thought she must have changed direction.

This was a field. Not a restaurant, or a nightclub, or whatever. A field. He had asked her to dress up like a monkey, and then had taken her to a field. Jack openly stared, because it was not often someone could catch her off guard. It was not often that she was left speechless. And it was not often that she found a surprise she was genuinely pleased with. Because, try as she might, Jack could not find anything to be upset with. And she had been so prepared to complain!

But, really, this was amazing. The dressing up was mostly painful because it put her out of her element in the public eye, but here, she could behave as normal with her attire putting no bearing on her attitude. She had been dreading stuffy fancy food that she would probably scarf down before she realized that the pea-sized portion was the entirety of her meal. She had been certain there would have been a crowd of the very people Jack sought to avoid in her evenings - those stuffy bureaucrats and their mistresses, laughing as they looked down their noses at the peasants beneath their ridiculously overpriced shoes.

But this set up was, in a word, ideal. The gazebo before them immediately drew Jack's attention and she found her feet was moving without a prompt from their master, approaching the gazebo. It reminded her of the enormous tree fort she had found out a few miles from her uncle's estate in Utah. The tree fort had simply appeared in the middle of a yellow field, it seemed, just waiting for an adventurer such as herself to want it, to need it. This gazebo had been waiting to serve the purpose of relaxing those who came across it, those who needed a brief escape.

And boy, Jack could use an escape.

"You..." she trailed off, unable to say much as she stepped up to the gazebo, moving around the table to walk the perimeter of the beautiful structure. She grinned wryly. "You got me. It's really..." She stopped as she reached the point that overlooked the waves. She stopped, her expression suddenly morphing into one of tender awe, her breaths swelling and breaking like the tide before her. It was then that she realized something so true - the world was so big, and she was so small, and that was okay. The breath left her body and she swallowed, finishing her sentence with a single word, "Something."

She suddenly turned around, aware that she had been too easily drawn into a reflective state. Being so open was dangerous, no matter who was present. The odd thing was, Jack would have liked to be open with Albus. Something inside warned her against it, and it was this that held her back, but the odd sensation was that which spurred change, the wish to somehow include him in what was going on inside the turning mind of hers.

The moment had been too long, almost too open, so she dropped her gaze and it fell upon a thick, certainly-unhealthy, hamburger. She pressed a hand to her chest, managing to pull off an overplayed look of shock, as though she had just looked down upon an engagement ring or something - though she would have more likely responded with a swift kick in that case - and said, "Is that for me?"

Thump. Thump. Thump.

It took some sparse seconds, for Albus to realise that his heartbeat was thrumming wildly.

Perfect, that was what this place was. Everywhere and nowhere, with the shelter of the summerhouse, the salty smell of the sea, the voices. They were murmuring now, a soft whispering chant that brushed over his skin like cool breath, like something tangible, like magic. He had always thought it was perfect. But the fact remained that as he lay, head caressed by dew-drenched grass, there was a space. A hole that didn't like to draw attention to itself, but was always there. Like a church without a cross. Like a house without children.

When that black silhouette, red hair fleeting carelessly in the wind walked to the edge; the will-o-wisp flitted in her footsteps. It rose, alighting on her bare shoulders, the pale ethereal light glowing white, illuminating a face caught in raptures that should never have been seen, much less appreciated. It illuminated peace. Innocence. And when she turned back, the world narrowed down to a pale face and red, red hair. Vulnerability. And haunting sadness.

For the first time, Albus realised, the voices were silent.

Something clicked into place then, like a smooth slide of a jigsaw piece to complete the whole puzzle. It all made sense. So much sense. And Albus felt betrayed because it was so.....anticlimatic, really. He had known it for so long....just not given it a name. He had been falling so long that hitting the surface brought no impact. And he saw her no differently. Just understood how it was really that he saw her.

"Is that for me?"

"I know it must be downright traumatic, to have all your wildest wishes fulfilled so suddenly." Albus smiled, and inwardly wondered if his voice sounded any different. It didn't, and that was betraying too, because the world had changed and yet everything stayed the same. He walked slowly, purposely, and dropped into the chair opposite hers. His arm spread in a wide, expansive gesture, "You're free to worship me all your life in abject gratitude."

His eyebrow quirked. "Eat."

((Um... my heart... I kinda want that back now. XD asdfghjkl!))

Jack's eyes rose from the wonderful sight of the hamburger and fell upon Albus' gaze, finding that it had already been on her. What might have typically prompted a scowl and a snarky comment managed to spur a smile, small and barely there. Jack's smiles were sparse and rarely genuine. It was hard for her to smile without feeling incredibly fake or forced. But right now, she felt genuine, and she felt pleased. Pleased to have company that was both accepting and challenging; pleased to be in such a new, yet familiar environment; pleased to find that she was not worried, or anxious, or scared, or angry... She was just being herself.

What a strange feeling it was, too.

Jack kept up the fun little act, as she was prone to do, fluttering her eyelids and letting her fingertips dance against each other as though full of giddy surprise. "I don't even know what to say! I mean, a girl can hope and dream, but then... it happens!" He sat down and she took his cue, moving to the center of the gazebo, away from the oceanic overlook, and sat across the table, rubbing her hands across the tablecloth as though greatly anticipating the slab of meat before her - and she only had to exaggerate a little.

He held out his arms and she smirked. "You think you're real hot stuff, don't you?" she quipped, grinning a bit wider. He commanded her to eat and she rubbed her hands together, saying, "You don't have to tell me twice." She picked up the burger and sunk her chompers into it. Mmm. It was cooked incredibly well, full of juice and exploding with flavor and seasoning. Her eyes flicked skyward in pleasure and she swallowed the bite, setting it down. "That's absolutely fantastic. I know this was supposed to be, y'know, super lame, but it's not. Thank you, Albus. This is really, really wonderful." And she meant it too. That was the crazy part. She had expected anything but this, and she certainly hadn't expected to enjoy herself. Albus was good at that though - spoiling her expectations.

(( ))

"Stuff of fantasies and dreams rarely ever come true." And when they do, you wish they had stayed in the story book in the first place. Albus curled his fingers over his fork, voice trailing off in a comment that probably said too much, felt out of place in a fun tete-a-tete like this. He shook himself, hard. Fun conversation. Yes. That was what he was making. That was what he would make irrespective of minds that span out of control, of jumping innards, of stomachs that were determined to rebel, of hands that wouldn't stay where they should stay and instead spasmed in mutiny, of legs that quivered ever-so-slightly and were too thankful to the support the chair provided. Of eyes that were the greatest traitors of all, and refused to stay glued on the plate as they should, and continued to rise up hopefully in search of......something. Something.

How could he deny them now? Now when Jack, for the first time ever, looked carefree and relaxed and herself, and his chest warmed with the appreciation of what a big gift that was? Albus bit his cheek, probably hard enough to draw blood. Looked up, eyes glowing like rough, uncut pieces of jade in the light of the will-o-wisp. Smirked. "Thinking what's true has never been a crime." Heard the blood roaring in his ears.

This couldn't be normal. Hell, this couldn't be normal. Somewhere amidst all the pounding, he could hear James' mocking voice, once upon a time when he had caught Albus hitting on his girlfriend: Trying to turn on the Slytherin charm, dear brother?

A disease. He was clearly suffering from a rotten, chronic, horrible disease of magnitude proportions that the world had never seen before. Albus looked away.

"Its alright. I don't bring people here often-" never. "and I thought you'd like it. Takes you away from all the noise for awhile." He shrugged. "Despite all proofs to the contrary, I don't really enjoy torturing you, you know."

Yes, that last comment was perfectly casual. He could do this. Now for a tactful divergence of topic. "So...uh, how's things going with your niece? And your room-mate....Mack or something, right?" Max. He remembered.

Albus bent his head and placed a morsel of food in his mouth.