Kings Of The World

((OOC: Dedicated to my darling Kitty, who insisted I finish this. The italics are parts from canon, obviously. ))


........and Reid felt his (f*ck it, f*ck it all, he had dared to hope after all) hopes come crashing down. His lips twisted, contorted to a sharp sneer worthy of the name, and his voice was too, too brittle. “Scare her. Of course.”



“Defense.”

“Potions.”

“Arithmancy.”

“Runes.”

“That’s three feet you’re talking. Eighteen inches of glyphs and decoding, if you’ve forgotten the arcane art of counting.”

“Hardly my fault if your font looks like ants crawling across a page,” A dark brow rose up, head tilting a bit to the side. “...is it?”

Long arms crossed over themselves, unimpressed. At least he supposed so, deducing from the flurry of movement at the corner of his vision. His eyes were rather occupied in scanning across the worn Alchemy text he’d smuggled into the library. Surprising, how little attention people payed to a book stamped with the Hogwarts seal. A seal that was protected behind only two mediocre Locking Charms; Pince Jr really was no patch on her mother.

Behind them, two girls were darting furtive looks at their table and giggling behind their fingernails. Then again, maybe it wasn’t surprising at all.

Hardly had he emerged from contemplating whether the IQ of all Hogwarts girls tended to the negatives- two fingers snapped an inch away from his nose, causing a blink and an upward glance: apparently his sister didn’t take to being ignored lightly. She was standing now, bending forward, crossed arms propped rather mockingly on the edge of his table, head cocked to the side. As far as her voice went, unimpressed didn’t quite cover it. A military commanding officer might have had a friendlier voice. “The fire. After dinner. You’ll bring the homework then. Don’t make me wait in the hallway.”

He raised his chin. “I see the badge just fine from a distance. You don’t have to shove it into my face, you know.”

A muscle jumped, rather violently in her jaw. He looked back innocently. The light shining off the polished Prefect badge did prick his eyes oh-so-irritatingly.

Apparently his-not-really-an-insult did not deserve a reply. She removed her hands from the table rather forcefully, wood shuddering in the wake, and whirled around- footsteps falling like mini-avalanches against the wooden floor. People looked up and turned round and gaped as she thundered past the aisles, headed for the main door.

He returned to his book.

“Madam Pi-iince!” Or maybe she wasn’t quite gone yet. “Are outside books allowed in the library? Books on.....alchemy, for instance?”

A few seconds passed, seconds when other students were being inspected, dissected and eliminated in quick succession. His lips curved up the second the beady librarian’s eyes settled on him.

He looked up. There was Pince’s mind-numbingly boring scowl, obviously. And the banging of the library door- not before he caught a glimpse of a bright, triumphant smirk ducking through the doorway.

Maybe he had generalised too soon. Amongst the stomps of a librarian on the rampage heading his way, hidden in the wrinkled pages of his Alchemy text, Reid smiled.


~
Reid's gaze flicked past his sister, for a second, to the girl in the room. It turned back, only to see that Rika had followed his gaze and was now standing there with clenched fists and whitened knuckles. There were two spots of colour, high on her cheekbones, a desperate look in her eyes. Reid refused to acknowledge how the sight made his stomach turn after all this time.



“You- “ Rika proclaimed, as soon as he emerged from the Great Hall, swooping down and seizing the end of his tie, waving it dramatically before his eyes. “-are an absolute disgrace to the name of this.”

Since aforesaid waving involved the vicious tugging of something knotted around his neck, Reid choked for a second before swatting her fingers and pulling away. He cleared his throat twice, and resumed walking down the corridor, fingers unconsciously smoothing down the red-and-gold material of the abused article of clothing. He didn’t reply, naturally. Didn’t even shoot the patented you-are-the-bacterium-feeding-on-the-scum-at-the-bottom-of-my-shoe look. Riled her up better that way.

The oblivious idiot, of course continued, waving her hands about the air dramatically. “She was drowning! The Giant Squid had gotten hold of her leg and was pulling and doing a lot more too if you’d believe her-”

“Good. The molluscs can give her all the action she needs.” Reid turned around the corridor.

“-and you were sitting under the beech tree, sleeping as if you don’t even care that a girl could be dying a few metres away from you-”

Bored. Bored enough to sound like it was a capital offense to his morality to waste so many syllables on such a useless topic. “I don’t. However did you guess.”

“Leslie Wright was in the lake for twenty minutes.” Rika crossed her arms over her chest, doing an excellent impression of disapproval.

“Which is more than enough time for her to drown, I think; but she didn’t, aided by the fact that she’s a state-level swimmer, as she so loves boasting about over dinner. Also was wearing a white shirt which left nothing to the imagination and possessed enough coherence to unbutton a third button after screaming for help, all while suffering through a violent death by Squid.” Reid was almost tempted to despair over the burden of common sense- but he rather prized his own.

Even over the crossed arms, Rika’s lips twitched violently. “Well, they did always call it the ‘little death’.”

“I am not going to have a conversation with you about bestiality, Rika.” The staircases loomed before them.

“We’re not. I thought we had mutually agreed that Leslie Wright was more interested in having you save her, wet and trembling from certain death, rather than the Giant Squid.” Rika skipped over the trick step and landed ungainly, lips still twitching behind the bird’s nest of hair that had tumbled on her face due to the action. “I am so proud. My little brother’s in demand.”

“Six bloody seconds does not make you-”

But Rika was hardly inclined to listen, because she’d already puffed away the hair from her face and began counting off from her fingers. “There was Belinda Mills...”

“Who’d just broken up with her partner of six months, who coincidentally possesses dark hair and grey eyes.” Yes, ‘partner’ sounded archaic and horribly stuck-up, but ‘boyfriend’ would drop from his lips over his dead body.

“Ariadne Thomson-”

“Publically dumped by her fiance who, even before this incident, expressed a daily interest in rearranging the topography of my face.” The boy hated his guts. Half the males in Hogwarts hated his guts.

“Alisha Merchant-”

“Who hits on every male who strikes her fancy, quite unwares as to how she’s been madly in love with her dorm-mate for six years.”

This one was with a little smirk. “Baird Mclaggen.”

And the reply was bit through gritted teeth. “For the last time, that was a dare.”

“Mhm.” Rika hummed pleasantly, that annoying little smirk still decorating her lips. “And the girl in dinner. Whispered in your ear to come snog her in the second-floor broom closet, did she?”

The little contemptuous gleam of canine peeking underneath his upper lip was effortlessly better than any Erika Dixon smirk. “If you think that’s all what people do in broom closets, dear sister, then you are hopelessly naive.”

Her lips immediately turned down irritatedly, but of course she wouldn’t lose that easily. “What she tell you then? All the steamy things she’d love you to do to her, that she’s hopelessly unaware you’ve actually never done?”

“She actually moaned rather suggestively in my ear and asked me to bring along the sister.” Reid answered, and now it was more than just a little gleam. “Apparently has a thing for twins.”

It took ten whole seconds for it to sink in. Rika’s brows first furrowed in confusion, then shot high up and scurried behind her hairline. Eyes widened comically, jaw hung slack in shock, and moments later the seventh floor corridor was filled with violent retching sounds.

“Ew. Oh ew ew ew ew....”

Reid bent down and right hand grabbing hold of her ear, dragged up his faintly-green looking sister from where she’d fallen into a kneeling position, doing a marvellous impression of vomiting up her dinner, without the actual puke of course. Rika whined, kicked her legs, went on a litany of ‘oh god just kill me now now now’, but he effortlessly dragged her through the towards the the corridor end without batting an eyelid. Revenge was sweet.

“Oi look out people, Dixon crazies coming through!”

“Oh , har har Bertie.” Rika shot at someone over her shoulder, voice coming from somewhere underneath his elbow. She was still trying rather unsuccessfully to strangle herself with her hair. From her rather justified overreaction, Reid deemed it rather considerate on his part not to tell her that this wasn’t the first time people had asked him to call the ‘hot weirdo twin’ along for a ménage à trois. When he hadn’t even agreed just for himself. And people wondered about his dwindling faith in the future of the human race.

Walking thrice back-and-forth before Barnabas the Barmy was rather unwieldy and unmanageable, what with his hand still tugging Rika’s ear along and her flopping about behind him like a particularly whiny extra appendage. Regardless, the door creaked open, Reid dumped fifty five kilo of flailing twin on the mauve cushion before the fire and himself dropped to the black one, palms falling on the warm stone, eyes looking straight into the flames. “Hello.”

“Hello yourself.” Answered the head bobbing atop the fire, hazel eyes and blonde hair cast green by the flames. “Not everyone has magical wizard powers to cure bruised knees for kneeling on a cement floor, you know. I’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes.
Reid didn’t reply. Every jab at magic still sent an unnoticeable twinge through his mind, replaying images and fights forgiven but never forgotten. Barbara probably knew it too, and took advantage of it, the bloody b*tch.

Rika seemed to have no such thoughts or compunctions hovering in her mind, rubbing the shell of her ear balefully and shooting commiserating looks at her sister. “Not my fault. I swear he gets more and more violent by the day.”

“Violence runs in the family, darling.” Barbara replied cheerfully, apparently all discomfort and pain of bruised knees forgotten. Bloody b*tch. “The general update from the household is that Dad’s watching the The Greatest Game Ever Played for the sixty-ninth time. Mum’s making Cherries Jubilee. The cat’s using your telescope as a scratching post. Anything happen at school?”

“Why my telescope?” Rika wriggled about in her cushion for a second, searching for a comfortable position, then raised her face to the ceiling as if asking the heavens for mercy. “Why the hell not Reid’s?”

“Because I do not chuck it in the shed, or behind the jasmine bushes, or into the fireplace and cause a riot on 1st September every year because I’m unable to find it.” Reid turned a page of the Flamel text that the Room had so thoughtfully provided next to his cushion. It did the same every Wednesday night, probably out of sympathies to his sanity.

Rika’s face tilted back down, chin crashing on her knees despondently. “Aanyway. There’s nothing much at school. You really need to stop pretending we have friends Barbara. Can’t help it if you stole all the people skills in our family.”

And left us with all the magic. It wasn’t there, but was practically appended to the end of the fullstop. His lip curved up slightly, grey eyes rising to see matching hazel sparkling back at him from the fire. Barbara’s head quirked down slightly, as if conceding defeat and a rather justified, sorry in her merry smile. Perhaps their sister wasn’t as oblivious as they liked.

“Love lives then.” Barbara said, and Reid’s head hit the wall behind him with a silent groan. No it wasn’t saying sorry at all. Just plotting elaborate torture.

Rika perked up almost immediately at that, the blasted twit. “Ooh, there’s plenty there. There’s this Veronica in Potions-”

“Vivianna.” Reid muttered, almost against his free will.

“Fine, Vivianna.” Rika’s pupils were dancing in her eyes, the stress laid on the name almost absurd. Almost, because he had caught her drawing little hearts with R+V scrawled within them all over Potions homework. His Potions homework. Vivianna had taken one look at that and gone white as a pasty. He had taken one look at that and gone for his wand.

“Anyway, so they pretend that they’re the only ones in Potions and go on trying to one-up the other and Reid actually answers in class.” Barbara made an appropriately horrified expression and Rika continued, “so they go on and on bickering and staring and pretending that all the excessive competition isn’t just some kind of elaborate foreplay, really.”

Reid turned another page.

“He does take ‘know thine enemies’ quite seriously.” Rika mused, and Barbara nodded helpfully along. “I half thought it was Reynolds last year.”

Reid didn’t need overdramatic displays of retching. He curled his finger, folded the crease and flipped another page and in that precise action managed to convey all the supreme levels of disgust the idea deserved.

“And then there was Baird Mclaggen at the party!” His irritating sister crowed and the other irritating one gasped. B*tch indeed, she never gasped. “He just walked over to the corner where Reid was standing and sno-”

“A dare.” The words escaped, perfectly bitten around the corners because clearly subtle displays of disgust didn’t penetrate through thick skulls. “It was a dare, and besides, Ivanov would have my guts for garters.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure.” Rika was doing the violent lip-twitch thing again, eyes twinkling madly. “She looked like she was rather getting off on it at the time.”

The next turn of the page almost ripped off the binding.

“Of course Reid hexed his balls off after that.” Rika continued, rather sadly. “But while he was being carried off to the Hospital Wing, Baird called after him, proclaiming- ‘But what a pretty face! How could anyone resist something like that?’ “

“Silencio.”

And of course everything degenerated into sheer violence after that.

~

He walked and walked, the warmth steady in his hand, till he came to a fresher patch of earth near a quiet corner of the yard, below the willow tree. Another delusion, it had been four years. It shouldn't be fresh. Except in his mind. Barbara Marie Dixon. 2010-2021.



It was late. The hours had fleeted by, lost somewhere in half-meant curses and overexaggerated irritation and secret smiles and carefree laughter. The last, had thankfully been at the expense of Barbara who had yet again forgotten that Floo was a little different from video chat, and brought something into the fire along with her to show them. Paper began smoking, she shrieked and ducked out of sight, and immediately followed the sounds of a book being violently smacked against the carpet, which would pitifully have yet another char mark to go along with its dozen previous. The two sixteen year olds at the other end of the line laughed themselves sick.

Now only the faint echoes of the laughter skirted about the shadowed walls, while slate grey eyes stared into the last few leaps of the flame, and gentle hazel watched him in turn. The third had her head huddled onto his knees, long bony arm thrown around his waist, cheek against his thigh, snoring softly. It was quiet.

“She’s drooling on your jeans.” Barbara smiled, and it would always be the brightest smile he’d ever know.

Reid’s fingers twined through a particularly long tangle of the brunette curls cascading over his lap. “I’ll get it cleaned.”

Silence lapped comfortably at the air. He had been staring at the light a long time, but his eyelids were yet to get heavy. His fingers carried out the mindless, familiar actions of untangling his sister’s hair. After a few seconds, Barbara’s quiet voice came, “You know its bad when you go all cynic inside your head.”

“What do you think would have happened that day.” He said, instead. His eyes were still fixated on the the dying embers at the edge of the grate, the fire in them struggling to live. “If I hadn’t followed you. If I had remained sitting at the restaurant table. If I had listened to my fear to.”

“Nothing.” Barbara replied, just as calmly. “Absolutely nothing.”

He met her eyes, raising an eyebrow. “You can’t possibly believe that.”

She laughed, a little bubble of sound vibrating in her throat. “What do you think Reid? You wouldn’t have been able to see the hooligans and pull us behind the rubbish bin, and they’d have seen us? Rika would probably have cracked all their bones, and a few cartilage to spare. Or we’d have ran.” She cocked her head to the side, Puck’s mischief curling up her lips. “What could have happened? You reading heart-wrenching, utterly unmeant eulogies at our funeral while your eleven year old mind cackled over our life insurance policy money?”

A silent hiss of breath escaped his lips at that- a laugh. Yes, the idea was absolutely ludicrous. Lack of common sense and incorrigible teasing set aside, sometimes he wondered what he’d ever do without them.

“Go completely maudlin inside your stupid little head, that’s what.” And Barbara wasn’t reading his mind, not really. Just stating her own. Then, in a much quieter voice, with firelight flickering off her eyes. “Can you look at us- this- now; and believe its anything other than invincible?”

The silence answered that.

A few minutes later, her sigh filled the air, like the kettle hissing over warm morning tea. “I really wanted to show you that book, you know. Mum used to read it out to us every night. Adventures Of Marvelous Children Over The World.” Her smile coloured with fond remembrance. “Remember Rika’s favourite, story eighteen? Brenda, the-”

“-blonde Canadian-” Reid spoke.

“-who loved tobogganing.” Rika completed, words mumbled against Reid’s knee. Her jaw cracked in an enormous yawn. “You two talk too much.”

But the silence didn’t last too long before, through a half-stifled yawn, “R-reid?”

He turned his head down, fingers still twisting. “Hmm?”

“How-...how d’you think....” Rika blinked blearily, her eyelashes mingling against the dark denim. “...the girls would react....if they knew there were three of us?”

His canines peeped out, just a little, again. “Henri Finch would throw a party.”

“Which would turn into a Dixon-For-All orgy.” He couldn’t see her half-asleep, half-amused smile, hidden as it was behind his knees again. “You should sleep.”

“I might fall into the fire.” His head settled back against the stone all the same.

“I’ll wake you if you do.” Barbara’s head turned from side to side, as if she was creaking her neck. “Time to see if my new earphones are really fireproof.”

“Won’t the bruised knees hurt though, for so long?” The question was a lark really. Except that both Barbara and Reid shared the quality of trying to find what hurt the ones they loved.

Barbara smiled. In the quiet words that followed, the barb was registered, and forgotten. “I’ll deal with it.”

The clock ticked. The flames kept on flickering. Barbara had long wires running into her ears, and she bobbed her head along, lips flickering to unheard lyrics. Rika’s soft, gentle puffs of breath moistened the denim stretched over his knees. Reid laid his head back against the cool stone and closed his eyes.

Invincible. It was one of the best words in the world. Right next to happy.