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noxtms · 3 years

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IN CHARACTER DATE : december 9th, 2020. SYNOPSIS : the answer to the question of where is percy weasley. TRIGGER WARNINGS : abduction & blood, torture implied.

and the panic sets in like this : slow and brutal, tar - thick in the back of his throat when he realises that he can’t move his hands. ( it comes as a double edged sword of terror and dread ; there is nothing he can do. PERCY is acutely aware of something sliciing neat ribbons into the flesh of his wrist, of the way blood trickles lazy rivers down his hands. ) hues haven’t quite been able to focus / devoid of either contacts or the glasses he only wears when he’s alone, percy’s never felt quite this helpless before. bound to god knows what and barely able to see : he cuts a desperate, sad image. he’s too afraid of the way the noise might ricochet in the silence, the way it might snowball into a sob that’ll wrack an attenuate ribcage. god, he feels exposed.

( and despite it all, he’ll cling to ludicity : he knows that screaming, begging, yelling won’t do him any good. crying out somewhere at the back of his mind, the sickened thought : this isn’t good. someone wants you dead, and if you scream you’re more likely to die. you cannot afford your mother another dead son, another casket her frail shoulder cannot possible bear. in the face of abject misery, you resolve to stay silent / complacent in your own disappearance. that’s if they notice, what if they don’t notice, what if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it scream --- )

somewhere, a rustle in the dark, and resolve crumbles. it can’t be helped. “please, help me, please.”

four words & suddenly it’s a performance / mask down, lights up, camera set, action. all the world a stage and the space is now a grandstand, one that amycus intends to milk for all it’s worth. he comes to life as if it’s that note of desperation that he’s been waiting for, puppet on string. he pushes wide the door of the room the other is held in as if it took force to burst inside, his chest heaving from imagined exertion, his wand clutched too tightly as if he’s ready at any moment to defend them from unseen terror. he looks equal parts terrified & frantic, as if he doesn’t know what’s around any shadowed corner and he wants to get them out of there as quick as possible.

of course, his steps falter immediately. a true rescuer wouldn’t hesitate to release the bonds holding the other in place, but AMYCUS holds back as if assessing a situation that needs no assessment. there’s a waver to his voice. “percy weasley. merlin’s beard... your family will be so relieved you’re alright.” he feigns a look over his shoulder, all the better for appearances. “i don’t know how much time i have...”

he’s begging. one sound from them and he’s already pleading, as if the sound in the dark is a savior, instead of specters plucked from ephilates of a tired generation. perhaps it would be a mercy to cut to the chase, but the carrow twins, well, they’re known for playing games. that’s all this is, isn’t it? their way of playing god by toying with percy like he’s little more than a plaything in the hands of spoiled children.

ALECTO lingers behind as amycus enters the room where the weasley is kept, falling into her own role. “did you find him? do you need me to come help?” her distant voice slips into the overlap of breathless apprehension and uncertain hope, the cadence of a rescuer watching for the return of the monster under the bed. languid are her movements as she paces, wand tapping across knuckles. “you have to be quick!”

if foreboding was a tight knot in the colum of a constricted throat earlier, it’s the cold tendrils wrapped tight around flesh now. solace would’ve been a warm blossom through limbs if PERCY wasn’t so brutally aware of who his supposed rescuers are : he’s no fool. the carrows’ faces have snarled up at him from posters since his days at the ministry, and a new wave of trepidity rolls right through a quaking, bound frame. ( as hard as he tries, there’s a buoyant little squeak from the backburner / “what if they’re here to help?” he’s many things but an idiot isn’t one, he knows that no good can come of the pantomime he’s found himself embroiled in. there’s nothing resembling hope in the scene that has begun to unfold. it’s strange, really : the brunt of percy’s heartache is borne of worry for the family he’s convinced he’ll leave behind. own mortal peril is LESS of a concern than their collective grief / he wishes, in these strange moments that he’s sure will be his last, that he could apologise to molly and arthur. sorry mum, sorry dad. you deserved better than this. )

“where am i?” he’ll try to amplify the modicum of bravery that’s set into his tongue, but it wavers / intonation gives way to distress and percy sounds like a fucking child, so far removed from his near-thirty years. “how long have i been gone?”

he’s more intelligent than they’ve given him credit for. there’s a spark of recognition in those wide, fearful eyes that couldn’t be DISGUISED if he had the forethought to try, and AMYCUS is almost colored impressed by it. the emotions rolling through him - terror, dread, uncertainty, grief - were so powerful in origin amycus had trusted in a cloud of doubt thrown over their faces, but percy weasley is not as much fool as the family name implied.

he casts a glance towards his sister, the sort they don’t need to couple with words ( it’s an old wives tale that all twins can communicate by thought, but the carrow twins are an old time terror, aren’t they ? two little children born to blood, lying awake in the dead of night and learning each other’s faces better than they knew their own ). it says he knows, even while the tiny smirk that pulls at the corner of his lips says, but we can work with that.

“you’re just outside of swindon,” he’s turned back to the other now and his expression is back to faux care, back to something that resembles genuine concern - all it misses, now, is the added note to a purposely trembled voice. amycus abandons this, now, going for confusion above flawless PERFORMANCE. “that isn’t a detail you need concern yourself with, percy,” long enough for the questions to start, yet not long enough for the printing presses to begin churning out the missing poster. amycus does not make a show of dropping the facade, once and for all : it is simply there, and then not. “the question is how much longer you have to stay.”

the hope in his voice gives way to an ill impersonation of courage, and ALECTO finds that it sounds little more than that of a child’s mettle. her brother looks to her and she reacts with a quirk of her brow, a casual cant of her head. ( he does? how boring. ) when she steps from the penumbra cast by the empty, unlit room she was waiting in prior, she looks a touch uncanny, with cheeks just a bit too hollow and pallid skin just south of a typical color since leaving azkaban. almost normal, if not for the little things. “quite ugly place, really. don’t know why anyone would wish to come here.” words border a taunt, an almost cloying thing on her tongue. only a matter of time before they figure him gone, and she’s called to work. certainly just enough of it to begin pulling at threads, to the start of unraveling it all. she takes a step or two forward, and it’s like she clisk into something, a return to herself maybe, when she falls into place next to amycus. she plays off of him. “and how long it’s going to take your family to notice. any guesses? no?”

it comes and goes in waves : the startling clarity that chills him right to the bone ( i am going to die at their hands i am going to die here i am going to be another tragedy upon the family name oh god mum i’m so sorry i’m so sorry- ), and then the hysteria that crowds his throat, makes him want to laugh in sheer delirium. it is altogether surreal, to feel your pulse running cold one minute and chruning something intemperate in your ears the next / PERCY weasley, alone with the carrows. fate has a funny way of rolling the dice, only to leave you stinging when you lose.

“what do you want?” ( an altogether practical question / percy’s never been one to sit around, wait it out. their histrionics do nothing for a choleric captive ; not when blood is still running thick rivulets down palms of his hands, when he’s bitton so hard at a lower lip that it too glistens crimson. there is a trace of it on his canines. he doesn’t know. ) “i don’t have anything you’re looking for, i swear.”

AMYCUS is a predator circling prey as he moves further into the room and closer, still, to percy. alecto joins him and only near to his sister does he feel - in an odd way, confident enough - to crouch at the others level. "don't insult yourself or our intelligence," it's funny, the contrast : his expression is cold but his voice is almost velveteen, low & warm & in any other setting, any other situation, nice.

"you aren't the only person with the information that we need, percy. you're here because ronald and ginevra aren't, but don't doubt in our willingness to abandon you here, alone, and finally introduce ourselves properly to your brother... or reunite, with your sister." he smiled. again : pleasantly. if not for the context of carrow, amycus would be nothing more than a professor expressing interest in catching up with an old student. "i promise that you don't want that to happen, and to stop it, all you have to do is tell us what we want to know."

pulse throbs something fierce behind eyelids, violent underneath the sacrum of his throat, helpless in the way he cannot move. “don’t you dare touch them. don’t you dare.” ( his heart beats a little faster at the mere mention of younger siblings. all those years spent chastising, picking at them, far too overprotective and never as kind as he should’ve been : symptomatic of a love that doesn’t know vernacular confines, that only knows the kind of rage that builds an inferno behind gritted teeth when they’re referenced like that. ) clever wizard that he is, PERCY can only kick out ; nearly loses his balance, almost topples his little prison over. it’s an adrenaline rush he needs / the kickstart he needs to spit another falsehood like a loose, bloodied tooth.

“i told you, i don’t know what you want.” and to some extent, he doesn’t : captor keeps mentioning information that he doesn’t understand. “nobody told me anything.” feigned reticence suits him ; percy makes a wonderful liar, all bruises and swollen despite the way lies make his stomach twist into sailor’s knots.

there’s a roll of dark irses, a testament to patience lost during her time in azkaban. “you’re right, how can you be so sure you don’t know without us even asking?” cadence borders something sing-songy, something sweet enough to rot. long strides bring her around his chair, where hands push down on the back, balancing what he had almost thrown askew. the legs are strident when they return to hardwood floor. percy’s boxed in by them both, now, and though wands aren’t drawn, they don’t need to be to prove a point. “it’s easy, percy. where is harry potter? his body, his things...” ALECTO paints an almost innocent picture with wide eyes and relaxed posture as she lingers over his shoulder. “and a little tip --- we don’t take too well to being lied to. my ideal day may not be spending time with the most boring, self righteous weasley, but like amycus said, we can just as easily go to one of the other, hm, is it six of you now?”

and the thing is, every fivre of an aching being is straining against this ! the hard line of a jaw is stiff with muscle, and yet it happens anyway : in light of alecto carrow lingering over his shoulder, circling like a vulture, PERCY laughs. it’s entirely humourless, dry and barked into atmosphere so tense you could carve it, but it happens. ( for what it’s worth he regrets it immediately / urge to be violently sick follows it, but he’s able to swallow that one down. )

“you think they told me where his body was? jesus fucking christ,” ( muggle london has fouled up that mouth --- ) “you can’t possible think they told me that.” hysteria is a slow bloom that’s spreading through blood and bone alike, deadly in the way it seems determined to swallow him whole. “every bit as fucking daft as she is, you two, thinking they told me anything. fuck.”

percy knows the price, knows it intimately before he’s even spoken. you don’t leave something like this unscathed, something like this without the battle scars to prove it. he knows, deep in marrow, that he isn’t leaving this alive. shaking, terrified, quaking with nothing but sheer fury, he steels himself for the bloe before it even arrives. this is what happens when you lie, when you laugh. this is what happens, and so it goes.

the carrow twins move deliberately. they move as one. where one pushes the other pulls ( like opposing magnets, still connected in some indescribable way ), always compensating for the other on little more than blood instinct. alecto crosses to steady percy and amycus - in what is almost bored glory - rises, only then, to his full height. she leans left, he takes a step right. she focuses upon their charge, AMYCUS allows his attention to float. he undoes the buttons of his sleeves, both rolled up slowly to expose arms that are mottled by stark white scars & marred by one recognisable tattoo.

"percy, percy, percy," he clucked his tongue, caught between chilling disapproval & aching disappointment. there's a reason that he keeps using his name, as if they're old friends caught in something neither can control : a power to claiming it, an added threat. "we already know of the boys connection to your blood traitorous family. all those summers spent under the same roof, one more child for your overworked mother to wrangle... of course you know where he is. your family loved him."

"i'm sorry, percy. i know you'll tell us what we want to hear-" he sighs. gaze flickers towards his sister, an almost imperceptible jut of his chin given to urge her to stand away from the seated boy, and from his back pocket is pulled a wand that is, even without brandishing, a threat. "but we did tell you not to lie." the striking of a snake : predator meet prey.

with the reverent uttering of "crucio," amycus' wand slashes downwards.

#nox.important #nox.event009 #i do love .......... fun <3 #hp rp #harry potter rp #appless rp #fandom rp #canon rp #oc rp #yes i will advertise via this . this event SLAPS

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hvrtlings · 5 years

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“ no matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first “

* ╰ lorenzo zurzolo ; 18 ; he/his —— wow, lachlan hawthorn sure has changed. i guess he is feeling isolated from the other gryffindor members. guess you can’t really blame him. i still remember him being so curious & adaptable now he just seems frustrated & evasive guess being a halfblood isn’t helping matters much either. i’m hopeful though. they’ll be just fine. ( zoe ; cst ; 21 ; she/her )

WARNINGS: infidelity, murder, car crashes, mention of war & hospitals & general bigotry ADDITIONAL MATERIALS: lachlan’s stats page, playlist, & pinterest board ADDITIONAL NOTES: this is fully a few thousand words longer than either nate’s or alecto’s intros and i should edit it down but i also need it to not be in my drafts. really sorry about that. if you want a tldr version please hmu!! or if you just want to plot!!!

when lachlan’s biological parents married, rumors abounded. plenty of couples from their class got married right out of hogwarts --- but none of those other couples were such a puzzling case to their peers. no one knew what sweet serena alessandri saw in declan glynne. sometimes, even serena wasn’t quite sure what it was about him; he was a dark beauty, something she could only call him in her head. he was the sort of boy who’d bristle at such a feminine compliment as beautiful; never mind that it was true. but for all his good looks, no other girl had been interested in him. maybe because he wasn’t a sweet guy --- just a guy who was sweet to her.

sweet serena alessandri: deposed princess of a new money pureblood family, she hailed from italy and had lived her whole life in clueless luxury. right up until her new money family found themselves newly penniless, and escaped to england to hide their shame.

the girls and boys she’d grown up with, gone to school with --- they turned on her and her family the moment they lacked the funds to support the frivolous life italian purebloods led.

oh, but they were mean. they rubbed her family’s new poverty in her face with well calculated cruelty. they were the reasons she vowed to keep her head down when she transferred to hogwarts. she was wary of befriending muggles and muggleborns, but wary of hating them, too. haughtiness got you nothing; she knew this well.

serena was hurt and young and foolish --- not to mention ever fearful of seeming those things. declan never acted like she was; maybe that’s all there was to her love. a sense of safety, if only from ridicule.

surly declan glynne: why, he hardly warranted a full backstory. he was an angry pureblood boy from a long line of angry pureblood boys who’d never had enough money to back up their feelings of superiority.

he was almost militant in his hatred of muggleborns and muggles; he hated muggles with a quiet passion, but muggleborns were the real problem. muggleborns infected his everyday life, stole opportunities directly from him.

hardly a radical feeling, but still --- his bigotry and working-class roots didn’t make for a winning combination. swimming in friends and admirers, he was not.

so the unlikely hogwarts sweethearts settled down months after graduating, and bets were made among their peers on how long they’d actually last.

everybody who bet that the answer was ‘ not long ‘ had plenty of evidence to support their stance --- namely, that while declan scrounged up a job in the magical maintenance department at the ministry, serena went to muggle university ( excelled there, in that world of finite answers and figures, like she never could in the magical theory and feeling and pronunciation at hogwarts ) and ended up working at a muggle accounting firm.

that while serena was making more money than the highest ranking official in declan’s department, declan stewed in his anger.

his resentment bled into the relationship. they’d never had too much in common; when the sweetness declan used to treat her with left, serena was so confused. but she hated asking questions --- fearful as ever of seeming young and hurt and foolish, wary as ever of showing a chink in her armor to people far better equipped for cruelty. just as she learned that the purebloods of her childhood were crueler than her, she knew without needing the lesson that her husband was crueler, too.

serena’s muggle coworkers and classmates had always liked her.

she’d always told a version of the truth, to explain why some simple things confused her so much — after all, it wasn’t a lie that she was grew up in a rich italian family who lost the fortune when she was in her teens and left her kind of adrift.

her confusion at taxis and ball point pens could be laughed off as a sign of her former rich-girl ways.

as could her need to be liked. they all knew she attended a string of elite boarding schools but ended up having to pay her own way through university --- knew that she worked hard and wanted people to see that about her.

so, yes: they’d always liked her. she was kind.

her coworkers noticed the seemingly sudden shift in her mood, and one brave man she’d worked on a few projects with took that notice a step further --- friendly and concerned about her, just as kind as serena had always been to him, andrew reynolds asked her out to lunch one day. and there, he asked why serena was feeling so low.

the sweetness and the kindness from him was enough to open the floodgates. maybe, she could admit, she’d felt a little starved for those two things. declan’s moods had only ever gotten worse. she answered andrew’s questions with all the honesty the ministry allowed.

she revealed that her husband wasn’t sweet to her anymore, that he was actually kind of cold. she revealed she was hurt and unsure of what she did wrong. andrew paid for her meal and told her that she hadn’t done anything wrong.

that one lunch, where he said he’d be there for her, devolved into many lunches, and then late-running meetings, and finally time spent out of the office. they fell in love — and she became pregnant.

she hid it from declan for a while; they hadn’t been having sex all that frequently, with his sudden ire at her putting a dent in romance. but she hurried to initiate it as often as she felt was ‘ normal ’ for a happy marriage, after she found out she was pregnant.

she wasn’t happy being married to him, but the idea of separating was alien to her — so she needed him to think that the baby was his.

she only got more unhappy with him, when she figured enough time had passed that she could reveal the pregnancy without suspicion. serena wasn’t sure how she’d have felt if declan had been pleased to hear they were having a baby — if any excitement or warmth would have won her back to him, if a return of love would’ve erased all her hurt. but the news only seemed to make him more miserable; so serena never had to find out.

fast forward: lachlan is born, the staff at st. mungo’s hurrying as best they can to get out of a room so tense where it should be joyous. declan named the baby, and serena let him. a pang of something wrong rang through her but she ignored it in favor of plastering on a warm smile.

then the trio returned home.

apparently declan ( who’d never been all that smart, whose suspicions never seemed to touch his wife, for all his anger at her and the world at large ) had wondered at serena’s change in mood before the pregnancy. he hadn’t really noticed she’d started feeling small and hurt and lost at home until she was happy again. and when she was happier, he got suspicious. he followed her physically when he could, spied on her magically when he could, and never got proof of an all-out affair --- but declan glynne had been born suspicious. he could wait.

here’s the thing: all babies kind of look the same. lachlan’s looks weren’t a shocking departure from declan’s and serena’s. andrew reynolds had been white, too, so it wasn’t like baby lachlan’s skin tone was super different. but declan had just made a deal with himself, like — serena and I both have light hair; if this baby’s hair isn’t almost transparent, I’ll know.

baby lachlan was born with a shock of honeyed-brown curls. so that was that.

declan was, all records would show, an anti-muggle wackjob. and he was beyond furious that serena ( his wife. he may not have loved her any longer, but she was his ) thought to pass off some ‘ muggle’s bastard ‘ as his son.

they lived in a little wizarding neighborhood a small ways away from godric’s hollow; some might say, kindly, it was more quaint than godric’s hollow. others, honestly, might point out it was a way cheaper godric’s hollow. a neighbor saw and understood what the flash of green light in the glynnes’ windows meant, and alerted the aurors.

baby lachlan was left generally parent-less, as serena was dead and declan ended up in prison. he might have ended up dead himself, had the aurors not arrived on time. godric bless nosy neighbors, and all that.

declan wasn’t a smart or wealthy enough pureblood guy to get away literally murdering his wife over an affair.

some people probably sympathized with him ( serena cheated on him with a muggle. when that saucy story hit the news, that fact was hammered in and plenty of people got where he was coming from ) but it wasn’t enough to keep him out of prison.

lachlan definitely did have a still living parent who would’ve jumped at the chance to take care of him — but the wizarding authorities never even considered andrew reynolds for any real length of time.

a peek into the auror office’s thought process: if we give him the baby we have to explain how and why and that serena’s dead. and it’s just easier to not do that.

a peek into the world of wizarding adoptions: even smarmy, blood purist wizarding society is all about preserving magical blood. so magical orphans aren’t long left without homes; magical orphanages aren’t a thing. wizarding families are often huge. so orphaned wizards are shopped around to even distant relatives and then, if that doesn’t work out, given to other families.

scandalous, family-less, little baby lachlan wasn’t long alone.

meet the hawthorn family --- edmund hawthorn was born edmund shafiq and was quietly exiled from his sacred twenty-eight family when he came out. which was fine, because his husband travis hawthorn came from a sprawlingly big and welcoming half-blood family and they took edmund in right away.

edmund still wrote to his parents, and they wrote back; they hadn’t disowned him out of bad blood. he knew his parents still loved him. they just loved the family’s image more, and needed to give him the boot in order to name his brother orlando the heir ... since he could give them more heirs.

travis, conversely, had a lovely relationship with his family.

both edmund and travis were pretty high ranking ministry workers. edmund worked in the office for the department of magical law enforcement — not an auror, but someone who puts together files and goes over paperwork and traces patterns. travis was a liaison minister with the department of international magical cooperation. they’re good guys with good reputations and the ministry was honestly relieved when they offered to adopt lachlan.

lachlan grew up with two sisters: della, who was five years older, and laurel, who was just ten months older. he loved them with all his heart.

people tended to think he and laurel were twins, especially growing up — the dads cut her hair a little short because she was always getting into a mess, and it was easier to clean mud and neon paint out of shorter curls than long ones — but with their matching hair and their alliterative names, their propensity to always cause trouble as a team ... they just seemed like twins.

him and laurel seeming like blood related siblings to the outside eye made it easier for the world to forget that the hawthorn’s son was the baby that caused that big scandal.

edmund and travis never lied to the two of them and said they were blood related twins or siblings, outright. but they did let the world outside their family assume that. they figured life would be easier for lachlan if that was the readily accepted truth.

lachlan wasn’t all that adventurous on his own, but found himself dragged into his sisters’ adventures; he could vouch from experience that mud and neon paint were a pain to wash out as it was, and couldn’t imagine adding more hair into the equation.

his sisters might’ve been better at getting into messes, but lachlan made up for it by being a mess. he was always having a crisis as a kid — his stuffed dinosaurs were just ravaging the block city, dad, but what about the finger puppet people in that apartment building? do they even sell dinosaur insurance?? why didn’t I think of the implications here ...

he and laurel played knights a lot, with toy swords and helmets modeled after the suits of armor in hogwarts ( travis asked edmund if that wasn’t a little much, when they bought them; they were a few years out from school, after all, they didn’t care that the helmets were accurate — ) and lachlan always wondered about the ramifications of two knights fighting each other. laurel always took the ensuing soliloquy of hypothetical questions as opportunity to knock him flat backwards.

he was a needy kid — he always had questions at his lips, a thousand moral quandaries to discuss. he had an active imagination and a tendency to let situations snowball into situations.

he was often hilarious, and rarely on purpose, and very easy to like. anyone who knew his birth mother would’ve been surprised to see lachlan — he truly was nothing like serena. he was bright and sweet and openly curious about everything. he loved storytelling and art and music; a perfect case to show that nurture always won out over nature.

when it was time for him to go to hogwarts, he wasn’t at all sure what house he’d get sorted into — it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ever been hung up on thinking about, for all that he’d wondered about every other part of the hogwarts experience. his dads had both been in different houses, and he had no way of knowing what houses his birth parents belonged to. the sorting hat cried out GRYFFINDOR a scant few moments after touching down on his unruly curls, and lachlan decided that felt right.

he loved hogwarts.

lachlan made friends easily and often — he’d grown up in the constant companionship of his sisters and knew well how to start conversations and shift them from uncomfortable topics, was skilled at asking questions that made people feel good and liked.

he was a little overzealous in class, but most of his professors liked him well enough. lachlan was still a curious guy, and seemed to genuinely care about each subject — something that went a long way towards endearing him to hogwarts’ staff.

though, some of the staff might’ve been endeared to him even if he wasn’t generally endearing.

his interesting past wasn’t a secret from most of the professors; travis and edmund had done well enough redirecting people’s memories around their son, but then most people had already forgotten about serena and declan, or else had never really known them in the first place. but many hogwarts professors recalled teaching the couple, recalled the shock their ending gave them, when the news hit.

lachlan’s ‘ story ‘ wasn’t something his dads had shared with him just yet, so lachlan himself didn’t know. it was a little maddening walking around the castle, when it felt like all the adults looked like they knew something he didn’t.

dumbledore, being dumbledore, took it upon himself to tell lachlan the whole sordid tale himself, when lachlan was just starting his fourth year. it was a shock ( it majorly pissed off travis and edmund, who never found out why the old man did such a thing ) but the next time he went home for the holidays his dads sat him down and explained that, no they weren’t hiding it from him and yes, they’d had plans set to tell him when he was seventeen and of age.

wizarding authorities could have hunted down andrew reynolds and told him he had a son, but they didn’t. travis and edmund, however, wanted to find andrew just in case lachlan ever wanted to meet him. so lo and behold — once lachlan knew, his dad’s set up a meeting for the four of them in muggle london. it went well; kinda full of shock and crying, even without breaking the ‘ wizard ’ of it all to andrew, but still well.

lachlan was perfectly happy with his sisters and his dads; for all that he’d always known he was adopted and for all that he’d always been curious as hell, he’d never really pushed his dads about his birth parents. his dads just were his dads. end of story — no need for questions.

which was part of why it was easy for him to go fourteen years before learning about his past. lachlan could not be paid to stop the flow of his curiosity, but there were somethings that seemed so solidly true he never thought to question them.

so while it was kind of cool meeting andrew, it was also kind of weird. knowing about andrew at all was weird — because it meant knowing that his mother had died days after giving birth to him, alone and scared and unhappy. and that her husband had been a bigot and a murderer; that declan glynne was still alive in prison somewhere. it was a suckerpunch to the gut knowing that lachlan had come close to being killed himself, if a neighbor hadn’t called the aurors on their house just in time to save the baby he used to be.

listen, he’d never wanted to know where he came from.

but he knew he’d feel, like, kind of bad if he just never saw andrew again. so with his dads’ permission ( and encouragement; edmund and travis thought this would be good for lachlan, like getting to know his Muggle Heritage from his Muggle Birth Father ) he hung out with him on occasion, during holidays and school breaks.

even though the professors clearly knew about his past, and his dads did, and his sisters did once he decided he wanted to tell them ... lachlan kept it all under wraps around his friends at school. he liked to think he was an open book, before. but learning where he came from made him want to play his cards a little closer to his chest. he couldn’t put his finger on why — he knew it worried his dads, he knew it did, and figured he’d get over it in due time, once he settled into the truth.

it just didn’t seem like the truth wanted to settle around him.

declan glynne had family. he was a middle son from a whole gaggle of bigoted, disillusioned glynne brothers. the ministry just never considered them when they were trying to figure out who would take lachlan on. they looked at serena’s family and saw no options, but declan was not lachlan’s father and, like andrew, was never even considered.

ian glynne had a bone to pick with this — had a bone to pick with lachlan’s whole existence, too, had a problem with that almost more than being overlooked.

( he thought that if serena had just kept her legs shut she’d never have gotten herself pregnant and gotten herself dead and gotten her husband sent to prison. more than that, he thought if she hadn’t gotten the idea of a muggle career into her head and made his brother upset, what with her math and her decent paycheck, she really would’ve staved all this off. but serena was dead — so it was easier to blame the baby, who wasn’t. )

he was a fan of simmering in his anger and hatred and kept up with the news about lachlan, at least enough to know who he ended up being adopted by.

and from there he got an idea; the hawthorns were good people — a compliment that would’ve come out as a sneer if ian voiced it, the judgement and sarcasm inherent in every syllable. he figured at some point, they’d tell lachlan who his birth parents were, maybe even introduce him to that homewrecking muggle. and if they did, and if ian kept a low profile, kept observing … they’d lead ian right to the muggle at the root of his brother’s injustice.

he wasn’t always watching lachlan, just keeping an eye on him by keeping an eye on his dads. he’d never been all that smart or ambitious — the glynnes were a family that thrived in their self-righteousness and self-importance and didn’t feel like they should have to act on those things to get what they deserved.

but his anger, his half baked plot, was enough to spur ian to action for the first time in his life. he rose through the ranks of the ministry through pure determination and will and ended up working in the same office in the department of magical law enforcement as edmund. they almost became friends; not earnestly, not honestly — not on ian’s part. but they did. friendly enough for ian to ask after edmund’s kids and get answers, friendly enough to hear about the trip into muggle london to visit someone edmund described as one of the kids’ ‘ distant relatives. ‘

he followed them.

and he didn’t do anything that time lachlan and the muggle were in the same place, but he started to plan.

it would’ve been too hard to keep magical surveillance over lachlan and the hawthorns, so he hadn’t, not ever. just kept an eye on them the old fashioned way, through word of mouth and casual water-cooler conversation. but andrew reynolds had no means of catching ian glynne in the act of spying. so, spy he did.

muggle police would later rule it a tragic car accident — shaking their heads at the carnage as they carted lachlan off to the muggle hospital while he clung with bloody hands to consciousness. it took hours for the dads to find him there and by the time his family reached him he decided he wouldn’t tell them any of the truth of what happened; told the official from the auror department once he got relocated to st. mungo’s, but only because he had to.

he never asked if that official told his dads. none of the hawthorns talked about the situation anymore than they had to, after that.

here was the situation:

ian glynne tailed lachlan and andrew all day — a saturday during easter hols during lachlan’s fifth year wherein andrew showed lachlan around muggle london. the pair had lunch together, looked in a few shops, and were set to drive out to andrew’s home outside of the city, where edmund and travis and lachlan’s sisters would meet them later for tea.

ian glynne got them on a secluded section of road just far enough away from both the city proper and andrew’s home to cause immediate alarm.

he came out in front of the car and andrew made to swerve around the man, but ian cast some defensive spell lachlan had yet to learn at the hood. it exploded — felt like they crashed into another vehicle even though they were the only car on the road.

lachlan and andrew both slammed into the windshield, but neither crashed through it. ian came ‘round to andrew’s side of the car and started screaming questions at him about serena and declan; then he shot him with a muggle handgun, something lachlan had surely never laid eyes on before.

andrew did not die from that initial gunshot — ian was a terrible shot, and was half out of his mind besides. the bullet just grazed him, and he inelegantly dragged andrew out of the car after.

lachlan made his way out of the vehicle too, bleeding and hurt, all cut up and bruised from the crash and the glass he had to wade through. he thought, maybe, he was in shock. he was certainly in shock once he finally bambi-legged his way out of the demolished vehicle and saw ian cast a cruciatus on his biological father.

and, still in shock when he saw ian whammy andrew with a killing curse after that.

ian did not attempt to turn his wand on lachlan — this was the second time in his short life that a glynne brother forgot to kill him once done with a more satisfying target. ian took for the bare april greenery lining the road and lachlan ( curious, trauamtized dumbass that he was ) ran after him. found a gun pointed at him for a terrifying moment before the muggle police sirens cut the air and sent ian apparating on out of there.

he fought to go back to hogwarts right away; it was only the first saturday of the holiday that all this went down, so lachlan felt, since he spent the whole rest of it in hospitals and bed, surely he was fine. the dads disagreed, and his sisters disagreed, and the auror working on ian’s case disagreed. he’d just become, in a way, an orphan. and it felt like no one around him cared to see him recover in the way he wanted to.

lachlan managed to bargain that he’d get to return to school as soon as ian was sent to join his brother in prison — none of the world any wiser that he’d been there when the newest glynne family crime was committed.

laurel decreed that it’d look less strange if both of them stayed home until then, and that was that. the dads wouldn’t begrudge lachlan the company of his sister, if he couldn’t return to full normalcy just yet.

della was graduated at this point, technically an adult working a fancy job at some boutique robe shop, but she came home every day from work and glued herself to her younger siblings’ sides. lachlan recovered his new, strange orphan-hood with his not-twin and big sister at his side, dads hovering around as much as their jobs allowed.

the hawthorns were tight knit and loosely configured all at once — always brimming with love and independence in spades, care expressed tenderly and roughly, like no one was sure how to be earnest. edmund and travis had always expressed affection like that: through arguing and debating and ribbing more than any big displays.

the kids worked the same way. family dinners used to be more running jokes and teasing than anything, raucous like none of them knew the definition of serious.

the five hawthorns weren’t really sure if that old normal was still achievable; lachlan’s brush with near-death met the daunting news lurking on the edge of their world. the whispers of war.

things became very real for the carefree family — the fact of edmund’s disownment, and travis’ famous half-bloodedness.

that all three kids were adopted with far-from-simple origin stories ( even if lachlan’s was the loudest, neither laurel nor della came from a closet free of skeletons ), that the dads were gay and the kids were open in their opposition to anti-muggle and anti-muggleborn sentiment

ian glynne might not’ve gone after lachlan for any of that, not really. but the possibility started to hit with dizzying closeness.

two weeks after the holiday officially ended, laurel and lachlan returned to hogwarts. if lachlan had seemed new and different upon receiving the news of his biological parentage, then he seemed really different following his brush with death and new witness to murder. it was the kind of different that was hard to put your finger on. he smoked now, and drank more; he was liable to fall into fits of melancholy.

cynicism did not come easy to him, but he found that wariness did, that secrecy did. it was shocking.

he finished his fifth year chomping at the bit to do something, anything, about the awful ways in which his world was changing. the next year only held more tragedy --- attacks and deaths and disappearances. no one knew what happened to him unless he chose to tell them ( and in truth, there was almost no one he chose to tell ) but he couldn’t help but feel a kinship with everyone newly hurt by this world. he’d been hurt by it, too, after all.

there was a small degree of safety offered within hogwarts’ walls, but he couldn’t help but want to be free of them. to be out there, doing something. lachlan would wait for now, ask questions and notice things and store them away the way he always had. but it started to feel like he was just biding his time until he had something to do with every new thing he learned.

#incantareintro #( ⊱ ━━ 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒕𝒐𝒍𝒅 𝒎𝒆 𝒈𝒐 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝒔𝒍𝒐𝒘𝒍𝒚┊intro. )

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