[ AC: The Yule Ball (HP crossover) ]
Aug. 18th, 2011 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tacticianFandom: Assassin's Creed x Harry Potter
Characters: Altair Ibn'La-Ahad, Malik Al-Sayf, Ezio Auditore, Desmond Miles, Lucy Stillman
Rating: PG
Warnings: Continued from like pillars four and its previous timestamps.
They are in the middle of a routine clean-up mission, clearing the proverbial closet of cobwebs after last week's arrest of a cult of half-crazed Dark Arts practitioners, when something starts to beep from the vicinity of Altair's back pocket. Malik dispels an engorgement charm on a charging monster spider, reducing it to a skittering daddy long-legs no taller than the toe of his boot, and turns to Altair with disbelief. He asks, “Is that techno dubstep coming from your arse?”
Altair has his wand pointed at him. “Expecto Patronum!” he snaps, and before the sudden chill even has time to settle into Malik's bones, a burst of blue-white light springs from the tip of his wand, tumbling like a crashing wave into the shape of a hook-beaked eagle. It lets out a screeching cry and cuts the advancing Dementor clear in half with its wingspan, dissolving it into sooty smoke, leaving only a residual shiver to run up Malik's spine.
Malik turns back only for a second to blink at it, but by the time he reels around again, Altair is already lowering his wand and reaching into his jeans with his free hand for his blasted muggle phone, which Desmond had apparently insisted that both his brothers carry around at all times, as it was supposedly infinitely more convenient than the Floo or their owls. It's still beating out a base-heavy one-sixteenth beat when Altair flips it open, the light from its tiny LCD screen making his face glow blue in the dark. “Oh,” he says, frowning as he presses a few buttons in succession. “It's Ezio.”
“Doesn't he know not to ring you while you're on the job?” Malik huffs, circling around to Altair's right side to peer over his shoulder. His irritation is more show than honest annoyance – the wards they've set up in the room have turned a benign green, signaling the lack of any foreign magic left in the room. They can already hear the other Aurors finishing up and regrouping outside.
“It's marked as 'urgent,'” Altair explains, before they both fall silent in lieu of reading the four-part text message, all in capital letters. They finish at the same time and a short, stunned silence falls on the pair, Altair's thumb still sitting on the 'scroll down' button, eyes lingering on the last sentence requesting immediate intervention (although the actual words are much less eloquent and more along the lines of DO SMTHNG ABT THIS ASAP!!1!! XOXO FRM ITALIA). “Why does he do that?” Altair says at last, voice coloring with distaste. “Why can't he just type 'Italy' like the rest of us? Damn ponce.”
“Altair,” Malik says slowly instead. “You better not be thinking of sending a howler to Desmond.”
Altair pulls a face.
In the end, Altair does not send a howler. A true man of the updated times, he sends a text, but not before enchanting it so that it read out the message instead of displaying it and setting the stipulation that any word typed in capitals would be shouted instead of calmly recited.
He then proceeds to type the entire six-part message with the caps-lock on.
Desmond literally jumps a foot into the air when he presses down on the innocuous flashing icon on his touchscreen, and it's only because he drops it under the Gryffindor breakfast table that it manages to even get past the first sentence. As it is, the phone has just finished screeching, “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT A SLYTHERIN GIRL COULD DO TO YOU ONCE SHE HAS HER CLAWS SUNK-” when his hand finally closes around it. Before it can even finish the sentence, he presses the 'End Call' button and thanks his lucky stars that Altair forgot that the problem with phones was that Desmond could hang up at any time.
The rest of the hall, too wrapped up in their own affairs, hasn't noticed, though Desmond throws a hasty glance at the Slytherin table over his shoulder just to make sure. Lucy's back is turned to him, her head bent in quiet conversation with some of her fellow housemates, and he sighs a breath of a relief. Barely any of the Gryffindors even take note, though Claudia, sitting directly across from him, smirks and slowly stirs her spoon around in her bowl of syrupy oatmeal. “So you fancy Slytherins?” she asks.
Because they are cousins, Desmond doesn't even feel guilty for kicking her in the shins. She does, however, kick back, twice as hard.
Petruccio, a first year, stops fiddling with the phoenix feather adorning the tip of his wand to blink between the two of them. “It sounded like they were fighting though, Claudia. It said the Slytherins have claws.” He sounds properly mortified, as Desmond’s brothers no doubt think he should be, but Desmond himself only pushes his breakfast away from him, crosses his arms on the table and buries his face in the crook of his elbows.
Claudia smiles and pets her brother's head indulgently. “Eat your cherry crumble, Petruccio.”
The phone begins vibrating against the floor and blasting out dubstep at one in the morning, muffled in the pile of their clothes but nonetheless incredibly unconducive to getting a good night's sleep. Altair groans and slaps a heavy hand onto the dresser, fumbling around the surface for his wand before curling a loose fist around it and mumbling a barely-comprehensible, “Accio phone,” face-down into his pillow.
An elbow digs into his side the exact moment the phone flies into his hand. “Shut that thing up!” Malik hisses, rolling toward the far side of the bed and dragging more than half the covers with him.
“I could probably figure out how to cast the Cruciatus curse over the phone,” Altair says by means of greeting, after pressing the device to his ear. “May no one remember your name,” he begins reciting, like an incantation of a powerful spell. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Requiescat en pace...”
“Did you speak to Desmond?”
“I sent him a text,” Altair answers, somehow managing to sound smug despite being sleep-muddled and cranky with exhaustion. “In caps.”
“But did you talk to him? He will not pick up my calls! Every time, I get his voice message. It told me his box was full today. Leonardo keeps on trying to tell me that it will be fine, Sofia is saying I am just fretting, and Machiavelli is telling me that I am worrying for nothing. He says that Slytherin girls are no less honorable than him!” Ezio says urgently, voice raising on the other end. “We need to nip this problem in the bud!”
Altair cracks open one eye and frowns at his phone. “Who is Sofia?”
“Did you hear me? Machiavelli says that Slytherin girls are as honorable as him! Desmond is doomed, Altair! We can't let that happen!”
Dragging himself up onto his elbows, Altair wedges the phone between his face and shoulder and frowns at the headboard, rubbing the sleep out of his face. Family crises are important, but to an on-the-field Auror, sometimes sleep is more so. He climbs across the bed and sprawls half-on-top of Malik, twisting around so that his head is cushioned in the dip of the other man's waist and stares up at the dim ceiling, where the blades of their ceiling fan have long since slowed to a stop. “I will see what I can do,” he accedes at last, closing his eyes with a sigh. “In the morning.”
This seems to appease Ezio. “Bene. That's good. He'll thank us for saving him from a broken heart,” he says, and after bidding their curt goodnights (But really, Altair, you are getting old – the night is still young!) and farewells, he hangs up.
Malik lifts his left arm and stares down at the crown of Altair's head, apparently having not drifted back into sleep after all. “I don't see why you two are kicking up such a fuss about this. Need I remind you that you were dating a Slytherin girl during our seventh year?” he asks, voice low and gravelly from slumber. Altair turns his face to meet his eyes, his cheek sliding against the bump of Malik's lowest rib. “For all of eight months, in fact. And the school didn't even burn down once.”
“Yes, exactly - and look where that got me,” Altair answers, throwing an arm over his eyes. The motion leaves his middle entirely unguarded, which is unfortunately perfect for when Malik kicks up the covers and aims a sharp and brutal kick into it with his heel.
It’s Ezio who sends a howler, although it’s a poor example of one. The letter is more of a desperate plea for Desmond’s sanity to please return than any actual scolding, and the effect is more or less broken by the occasional soft appeasements in Leonardo’s voice when Ezio forgets to erase his postscripts in flowing, spindly cursive from the margins. The end result is therefore a strange combination of, “DESMOND I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE THE SENSIBLE ONE - Ezio, please, just calm down and also revise this spelling - OUT OF THE THREE OF US. INVITING A SLYTHERIN TO THE YULE BALL? EVEN ALTAIR WOULDN’T - P.S. Do you think this is actually a good argument? I am not sure pitting brothers against each other will really accomplish all that much ASK A...WELL, HE DID, BUT HE KNOWS BETTER NOW. HOW COULD YOU?!” and similar iterations.
By the time it ends, Desmond is in the process of trying to mash his eyeballs into his sockets with his hands, clearly determined to test the theory of whether or not there are things Madame Pomfrey can’t, in fact, fix. He can practically see Claudia’s smirk burning through the flesh of his palms and the snickering that has started to overtake the pregnant silence of the Great Hall is threatening to make him spontaneously combust, judging from the heat clawing at his skin. Without looking, he knows Shaun and Rebecca are probably halfway through stuffing their fists in their mouths to keep from guffawing, and he doesn’t even want to think what the Slytherin table looks like right now.
But really, he just doesn’t understand - everyone else seems to have relatively-normal siblings (and yes, he knows that in his case, ‘relative’ is like comparing a house settling to the toppling of a twenty-three story building from a nine-point-six earthquake), and he’s sixteen now. He may have been deluded, but he had always thought who he wanted to date would be his decision, and he supposes, in retrospect, he really should have known better, but considering how he spent four-sevenths of his Hogwarts career trying to lay low and be the complete antithesis of his siblings, he just can’t wrap his mind around how this is even his life?!
When he finally does gather up enough courage (he is a Gryffindor, after all) to drag his hands down from his eyes, blinking his vision back into focus and clearing it of the spotty patches of color caused by the pressure of his fingers, the first thing he sees is the teacher’s table, where Headmaster Juno is just shaking her head and looking like she should have, in fact, opted for her thirty-sixth cup of muggle coffee laced with Pepper Up this morning. The other professors just look amused, although Coach Bartolomeo is wildly gesturing with completely inappropriate thumbs-up motions at the end.
He ignores Claudia’s inevitable catty look in favor of looking to Shaun and Rebecca, finding their faces curiously devoid of any teasing. Instead, they’re staring wide-eyed right back at him. Rebecca has her hands in front of her face, bits of bubblegum webbing her fingers together, like she brought them to her mouth in surprise and forgot she had blown a bubble there. Desmond glances at Shaun, who, in a rare display of actual friendship, finally takes pity on him and points behind Desmond, mouthing the word, Look.
Slowly, so slowly he wouldn’t be surprised to hear his bones creak like the hinges of a door in desperate need of oiling, Desmond twists around in his seat.
Lucy has her arms crossed over her chest, hip canted under her robes and mouth curled into an unreadable smile that seems to hint towards fondness and exasperation all at once. Desmond has been trying to decipher that particular expression for two years now, and he’s no closer to a conclusion at this moment in time than he was last year, when the sight of her face after a phenomenal mishap involving a mind-scrambling Sleep Potion threatened to knock the air right out of his lungs. “Did you have something to ask me, Desmond?” she asks.
“...Hey, Lucy, what’s up with you?” Desmond manages, incredibly inspired in moments of panic, even if his tongue stumbles over his teeth like it’s made of cotton, making the words sound more like, “‘Ey, Lucy, whassamatta you?”
“You don’t really have many Slytherin friends, Desmond,” Lucy says, patiently.
Oh no, thinks Desmond, only realizing a moment later that he had said the ‘no’ part of that aborted thought aloud. He honestly begins contemplating the practicality of living out the rest of his fifth year under the guise of a polyjuice potion, the bliss of being unrecognizable and under the radar almost too tempting to bear.
“Yes,” Lucy corrects.
He blinks owlishly at her. “What?”
“Yes,” she repeats, and this time her smile shifts a minuscule degree just to the side of ‘pleased’ rather than ‘annoyed,’ making her expression suddenly so much easier to understand. Desmond is vaguely aware that he hasn’t even asked a yes-no question yet, and that ‘yes’ is not really the customary answer to ‘What’s up,’ but perhaps Lucy has never really been one for speaking out things that didn’t really need to be said in the first place. “Yes,” she says again, while the hall begins to titter back to life. “If you were going to ask about the Yule Ball, I’m just saying - the answer would have been ‘Yes.’”
Unnoticed, the howler disintegrates into ashes onto Desmond’s forgotten plate.
Characters: Altair Ibn'La-Ahad, Malik Al-Sayf, Ezio Auditore, Desmond Miles, Lucy Stillman
Rating: PG
Warnings: Continued from like pillars four and its previous timestamps.
They are in the middle of a routine clean-up mission, clearing the proverbial closet of cobwebs after last week's arrest of a cult of half-crazed Dark Arts practitioners, when something starts to beep from the vicinity of Altair's back pocket. Malik dispels an engorgement charm on a charging monster spider, reducing it to a skittering daddy long-legs no taller than the toe of his boot, and turns to Altair with disbelief. He asks, “Is that techno dubstep coming from your arse?”
Altair has his wand pointed at him. “Expecto Patronum!” he snaps, and before the sudden chill even has time to settle into Malik's bones, a burst of blue-white light springs from the tip of his wand, tumbling like a crashing wave into the shape of a hook-beaked eagle. It lets out a screeching cry and cuts the advancing Dementor clear in half with its wingspan, dissolving it into sooty smoke, leaving only a residual shiver to run up Malik's spine.
Malik turns back only for a second to blink at it, but by the time he reels around again, Altair is already lowering his wand and reaching into his jeans with his free hand for his blasted muggle phone, which Desmond had apparently insisted that both his brothers carry around at all times, as it was supposedly infinitely more convenient than the Floo or their owls. It's still beating out a base-heavy one-sixteenth beat when Altair flips it open, the light from its tiny LCD screen making his face glow blue in the dark. “Oh,” he says, frowning as he presses a few buttons in succession. “It's Ezio.”
“Doesn't he know not to ring you while you're on the job?” Malik huffs, circling around to Altair's right side to peer over his shoulder. His irritation is more show than honest annoyance – the wards they've set up in the room have turned a benign green, signaling the lack of any foreign magic left in the room. They can already hear the other Aurors finishing up and regrouping outside.
“It's marked as 'urgent,'” Altair explains, before they both fall silent in lieu of reading the four-part text message, all in capital letters. They finish at the same time and a short, stunned silence falls on the pair, Altair's thumb still sitting on the 'scroll down' button, eyes lingering on the last sentence requesting immediate intervention (although the actual words are much less eloquent and more along the lines of DO SMTHNG ABT THIS ASAP!!1!! XOXO FRM ITALIA). “Why does he do that?” Altair says at last, voice coloring with distaste. “Why can't he just type 'Italy' like the rest of us? Damn ponce.”
“Altair,” Malik says slowly instead. “You better not be thinking of sending a howler to Desmond.”
Altair pulls a face.
In the end, Altair does not send a howler. A true man of the updated times, he sends a text, but not before enchanting it so that it read out the message instead of displaying it and setting the stipulation that any word typed in capitals would be shouted instead of calmly recited.
He then proceeds to type the entire six-part message with the caps-lock on.
Desmond literally jumps a foot into the air when he presses down on the innocuous flashing icon on his touchscreen, and it's only because he drops it under the Gryffindor breakfast table that it manages to even get past the first sentence. As it is, the phone has just finished screeching, “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT A SLYTHERIN GIRL COULD DO TO YOU ONCE SHE HAS HER CLAWS SUNK-” when his hand finally closes around it. Before it can even finish the sentence, he presses the 'End Call' button and thanks his lucky stars that Altair forgot that the problem with phones was that Desmond could hang up at any time.
The rest of the hall, too wrapped up in their own affairs, hasn't noticed, though Desmond throws a hasty glance at the Slytherin table over his shoulder just to make sure. Lucy's back is turned to him, her head bent in quiet conversation with some of her fellow housemates, and he sighs a breath of a relief. Barely any of the Gryffindors even take note, though Claudia, sitting directly across from him, smirks and slowly stirs her spoon around in her bowl of syrupy oatmeal. “So you fancy Slytherins?” she asks.
Because they are cousins, Desmond doesn't even feel guilty for kicking her in the shins. She does, however, kick back, twice as hard.
Petruccio, a first year, stops fiddling with the phoenix feather adorning the tip of his wand to blink between the two of them. “It sounded like they were fighting though, Claudia. It said the Slytherins have claws.” He sounds properly mortified, as Desmond’s brothers no doubt think he should be, but Desmond himself only pushes his breakfast away from him, crosses his arms on the table and buries his face in the crook of his elbows.
Claudia smiles and pets her brother's head indulgently. “Eat your cherry crumble, Petruccio.”
The phone begins vibrating against the floor and blasting out dubstep at one in the morning, muffled in the pile of their clothes but nonetheless incredibly unconducive to getting a good night's sleep. Altair groans and slaps a heavy hand onto the dresser, fumbling around the surface for his wand before curling a loose fist around it and mumbling a barely-comprehensible, “Accio phone,” face-down into his pillow.
An elbow digs into his side the exact moment the phone flies into his hand. “Shut that thing up!” Malik hisses, rolling toward the far side of the bed and dragging more than half the covers with him.
“I could probably figure out how to cast the Cruciatus curse over the phone,” Altair says by means of greeting, after pressing the device to his ear. “May no one remember your name,” he begins reciting, like an incantation of a powerful spell. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Requiescat en pace...”
“Did you speak to Desmond?”
“I sent him a text,” Altair answers, somehow managing to sound smug despite being sleep-muddled and cranky with exhaustion. “In caps.”
“But did you talk to him? He will not pick up my calls! Every time, I get his voice message. It told me his box was full today. Leonardo keeps on trying to tell me that it will be fine, Sofia is saying I am just fretting, and Machiavelli is telling me that I am worrying for nothing. He says that Slytherin girls are no less honorable than him!” Ezio says urgently, voice raising on the other end. “We need to nip this problem in the bud!”
Altair cracks open one eye and frowns at his phone. “Who is Sofia?”
“Did you hear me? Machiavelli says that Slytherin girls are as honorable as him! Desmond is doomed, Altair! We can't let that happen!”
Dragging himself up onto his elbows, Altair wedges the phone between his face and shoulder and frowns at the headboard, rubbing the sleep out of his face. Family crises are important, but to an on-the-field Auror, sometimes sleep is more so. He climbs across the bed and sprawls half-on-top of Malik, twisting around so that his head is cushioned in the dip of the other man's waist and stares up at the dim ceiling, where the blades of their ceiling fan have long since slowed to a stop. “I will see what I can do,” he accedes at last, closing his eyes with a sigh. “In the morning.”
This seems to appease Ezio. “Bene. That's good. He'll thank us for saving him from a broken heart,” he says, and after bidding their curt goodnights (But really, Altair, you are getting old – the night is still young!) and farewells, he hangs up.
Malik lifts his left arm and stares down at the crown of Altair's head, apparently having not drifted back into sleep after all. “I don't see why you two are kicking up such a fuss about this. Need I remind you that you were dating a Slytherin girl during our seventh year?” he asks, voice low and gravelly from slumber. Altair turns his face to meet his eyes, his cheek sliding against the bump of Malik's lowest rib. “For all of eight months, in fact. And the school didn't even burn down once.”
“Yes, exactly - and look where that got me,” Altair answers, throwing an arm over his eyes. The motion leaves his middle entirely unguarded, which is unfortunately perfect for when Malik kicks up the covers and aims a sharp and brutal kick into it with his heel.
It’s Ezio who sends a howler, although it’s a poor example of one. The letter is more of a desperate plea for Desmond’s sanity to please return than any actual scolding, and the effect is more or less broken by the occasional soft appeasements in Leonardo’s voice when Ezio forgets to erase his postscripts in flowing, spindly cursive from the margins. The end result is therefore a strange combination of, “DESMOND I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE THE SENSIBLE ONE - Ezio, please, just calm down and also revise this spelling - OUT OF THE THREE OF US. INVITING A SLYTHERIN TO THE YULE BALL? EVEN ALTAIR WOULDN’T - P.S. Do you think this is actually a good argument? I am not sure pitting brothers against each other will really accomplish all that much ASK A...WELL, HE DID, BUT HE KNOWS BETTER NOW. HOW COULD YOU?!” and similar iterations.
By the time it ends, Desmond is in the process of trying to mash his eyeballs into his sockets with his hands, clearly determined to test the theory of whether or not there are things Madame Pomfrey can’t, in fact, fix. He can practically see Claudia’s smirk burning through the flesh of his palms and the snickering that has started to overtake the pregnant silence of the Great Hall is threatening to make him spontaneously combust, judging from the heat clawing at his skin. Without looking, he knows Shaun and Rebecca are probably halfway through stuffing their fists in their mouths to keep from guffawing, and he doesn’t even want to think what the Slytherin table looks like right now.
But really, he just doesn’t understand - everyone else seems to have relatively-normal siblings (and yes, he knows that in his case, ‘relative’ is like comparing a house settling to the toppling of a twenty-three story building from a nine-point-six earthquake), and he’s sixteen now. He may have been deluded, but he had always thought who he wanted to date would be his decision, and he supposes, in retrospect, he really should have known better, but considering how he spent four-sevenths of his Hogwarts career trying to lay low and be the complete antithesis of his siblings, he just can’t wrap his mind around how this is even his life?!
When he finally does gather up enough courage (he is a Gryffindor, after all) to drag his hands down from his eyes, blinking his vision back into focus and clearing it of the spotty patches of color caused by the pressure of his fingers, the first thing he sees is the teacher’s table, where Headmaster Juno is just shaking her head and looking like she should have, in fact, opted for her thirty-sixth cup of muggle coffee laced with Pepper Up this morning. The other professors just look amused, although Coach Bartolomeo is wildly gesturing with completely inappropriate thumbs-up motions at the end.
He ignores Claudia’s inevitable catty look in favor of looking to Shaun and Rebecca, finding their faces curiously devoid of any teasing. Instead, they’re staring wide-eyed right back at him. Rebecca has her hands in front of her face, bits of bubblegum webbing her fingers together, like she brought them to her mouth in surprise and forgot she had blown a bubble there. Desmond glances at Shaun, who, in a rare display of actual friendship, finally takes pity on him and points behind Desmond, mouthing the word, Look.
Slowly, so slowly he wouldn’t be surprised to hear his bones creak like the hinges of a door in desperate need of oiling, Desmond twists around in his seat.
Lucy has her arms crossed over her chest, hip canted under her robes and mouth curled into an unreadable smile that seems to hint towards fondness and exasperation all at once. Desmond has been trying to decipher that particular expression for two years now, and he’s no closer to a conclusion at this moment in time than he was last year, when the sight of her face after a phenomenal mishap involving a mind-scrambling Sleep Potion threatened to knock the air right out of his lungs. “Did you have something to ask me, Desmond?” she asks.
“...Hey, Lucy, what’s up with you?” Desmond manages, incredibly inspired in moments of panic, even if his tongue stumbles over his teeth like it’s made of cotton, making the words sound more like, “‘Ey, Lucy, whassamatta you?”
“You don’t really have many Slytherin friends, Desmond,” Lucy says, patiently.
Oh no, thinks Desmond, only realizing a moment later that he had said the ‘no’ part of that aborted thought aloud. He honestly begins contemplating the practicality of living out the rest of his fifth year under the guise of a polyjuice potion, the bliss of being unrecognizable and under the radar almost too tempting to bear.
“Yes,” Lucy corrects.
He blinks owlishly at her. “What?”
“Yes,” she repeats, and this time her smile shifts a minuscule degree just to the side of ‘pleased’ rather than ‘annoyed,’ making her expression suddenly so much easier to understand. Desmond is vaguely aware that he hasn’t even asked a yes-no question yet, and that ‘yes’ is not really the customary answer to ‘What’s up,’ but perhaps Lucy has never really been one for speaking out things that didn’t really need to be said in the first place. “Yes,” she says again, while the hall begins to titter back to life. “If you were going to ask about the Yule Ball, I’m just saying - the answer would have been ‘Yes.’”
Unnoticed, the howler disintegrates into ashes onto Desmond’s forgotten plate.