[OPEN] Encore Une Fois

Charlie’s summer had been weird.

The Great Jericho/Dyllan Sleepover of 2030 had indeed occured, becoming a seminal event in the course of their blossoming friendship-cum-intellectual-partnership. Still now Charlie thought of their extended holiday union as an exhilarating, grass-stained dream, a series of filmy snapshots of a fuller, buoyant life.

Mornings spent gulping gallons of tea and shovelling down mountains of toast and muffins, pulling on faded wellies to wade through the mud at the edge of the pond with nets and a stack of encyclopaedias they had to take turns carrying, collecting samples and comparing observations, searching for treasure amongst the reeds. Visiting Bertha’s allotment and returning to make a full-blown ecosystem out of their neglected patch of greenery, painstakingly collecting dittany to tend to themselves and aconite to pass on to the Dyllan guardian. Doxy-hunting with homemade doxycide, developing a formula that Maddie declared “lethal”, after which they did not tell her about their secret search for mandrakes that had proven more than fruitful.

Afternoons spent hiking through miles of greenery, climbing hills and fences and setting up camp with squashed packed lunches and sunburned noses, food forgotten with each pair of mysterious prints to track. Birdwatching, abraxan riding, lavender picking, moving still and carefully enough to spot a colony of bowtruckles but not fast enough to evade a pack of angry red caps. Impromptu, Kathryn-officiated quidditch matches that were finally multiplayer, discovering that his dad’s professional brooms really had been child-proofed after all. Discovering that the same could not be said for the study and spending hours ensconced in quiet camaraderie with a menagerie of books and papers, silence only broken by the occasional gem to be shared and pondered or laughed at.

Evenings spent cycling along warm, beaten tracks of tarmac down empty, sleepy streets, Goose and Charlie wobbling on oversized bikes and Sunny perched on Kathryn’s handlebars. Gathered around the pock-marked kitchen table and a mountain of expedition records and photo albums, piecing together tales of adventures in far-flung lands, rivers and caves and geysers, from imagination and memory and Maddie’s obliging recollections. The telly neglected, the neighbours roused, the pygmy puffs allowed to run riot in an upturned kitchen, where they concocted feasts out of the day’s fresh pickings under Bertha’s fussing eye.

Nights spent lying on the trampoline that was a lasting monument to the generosity of his dad’s guilt and fighting the city smog to sleepily put their elementary Astronomy to good use. Whispering over Sunny’s head when she fell asleep, sometimes falling asleep with her and waking up to birdsong beneath a pile of thick blankets. Declaring themselves too old for forts but building one to shelter from the rain the night the grindylow escaped and his mum and an old colleague spent hours in the wet darkness re-capturing it, and they’d been forbidden from helping but allowed to watch under a disillusionment charm. Climbing up to the attic to listen to Kathryn’s ghost stories in a pitch-black circle, where Charlie had clutched Sunny’s hand and tried to be a Gryffindor, wondering if Goose’s uncommon silence meant he was more or less scared by his sister’s torch-lit performance.

They’d been so distracted by magic they’d never needed wands.

A cleansing wind had blown through the Jericho household and chased out the ghosts. The days weren’t so long. The nights weren’t so quiet. Even the thunderstorms were thrilling, sneaking out under improvised anorak tents to usher in the odd stray at Sunny’s direction.

There’d been more strays that summer.

That had been the good sort of weird.

Then there had been The Camping Trip That Changed Things. It had coincided in part with Sunny and Goose's visit and so Charlie hadn't had a chance to sense the shift that had occurred on some seismic level in the household, inexplicably to them all. They'd gone and then they'd returned, browned and wind-blown, smelling of damp and campfires. He'd assumed it was a final hurrah, a last nod to the nostalgia of childhood adventures that he'd had no share in and so didn't question. It wasn't until much later that he began to get the impression that Kathryn and Casper had weathered a storm, but weirdly -impossibly- one with Casper at its eye for once. And Charlie felt adrift, left behind in the wake of something he did not know enough of to comprehend.

He didn't know how to spot the wreckage of an impossible event.

For a while, Kathryn had been more loquacious, the stream that was her usual conversation slipping into stronger currents, bubbling and frothing with anecdotes about “Margo, absolutely mental in the best way, Mum” and “uptight-but-alright-Ace” and “Molly, cool I guess” for weeks, until the well of goodwill slowed abruptly to a miserly trickle. The premature coating of ice had allowed for infrequent mentions of Margo, tolerated mention of Ace. Beyond that- around him, at least- stony, stubborn silence.

And Casper… Casper had been absent.

He was still absent now, having flooed in that morning to apologise for not being able to see them off as he’d promised Charlie, to wish them all luck on the journey and the advent of autumn, and to quietly but firmly tell Maddie and Kathryn that he was settling in fine, the boxes were almost unpacked, Jack and the department were great, and not to worry.

But he wasn’t coming.

This had elicited a scowl from Kathryn that lasted half the car journey to King’s Cross and a pensive look on his mum’s face that still hadn’t faded after they’d crashed through the barrier with their usual entourage of assorted beasts and paltry luggage. Neither had mentioned Casper after that.

That was the weird sort of weird.

Dragging her trunk off the trolley and carting off her new Streeler in its tank before their mum could object, Kathryn quickly ran off, hair flying and laugh floating, swept into her usual crowd of Gryffindor ties, all linked arms and high-pitched exclamations. But she casually side-stepped the serious-faced Hufflepuff in her way before she had to squeeze out a greeting, and glanced around the platform with sharp, wary eyes every time they stopped to collect another member of their entourage with that stubborn set of the chin that heralded trouble if she could find it.

Casper was gone, Kathryn was angry, and Charlie…