A tempest of anxiety had been whipped up within the Gryffindor. He was being let in through the doors of his lover’s past and he had little clue of how it was going to play out before him or whether he would be blind with rage at the injustices of Ben’s upbringing. He curled his arm unconsciously around the elder man when his arm came across Bae’s shoulders. He leaned in and placed a kiss to his lover’s neck, just below where his scruff began. Lifting his head again, Baldric focused on absorbing everything that surrounded them. He wanted to see Ben’s world. He wanted to understand it. Moreover, he wanted to protect him from it.
Regret passed over Bae’s features when Ben let him go but he didn’t let it linger. Instead he raised a smile for the man and slid through into the foyer of the orphanage, feeling grossly out of place and monumentally guilty. All these children had ever wanted was a family. All these children would ever want was a family. Baldric had that. He’d been lucky. In teenaged temper he’d scorned them and had walked out more often than he stayed. He abandoned his family – treated them like some sort of boomerang station, he the wood and they there to catch him every time he returned. He loved them but he didn’t want to be with them. He was ungrateful, he knew, because he had everything the children aspired to and since he had been old enough with a mind to leave.
Baldric paused, letting his hands slide into the pockets of his coat. He looked round as the sound of wheels on boards met his ears and he was surprised to see a woman with a mega-watt smile approaching them – well, Ben. Baldric still had enough post-illness cynicism in him to make him doubt the simpering. In fact, he supposed that it was years of knowing Millie but there was a cynic in him anyway – one that really did doubt she was as pleased to see them as her smile and eager handshake suggested. Perhaps he was just losing the will to live around women. Perhaps he had finally transitioned into a twenty-something hermit who was only interested in a small circle of friends and acquaintances who were all cut from the same cloth. Good Merlin he was his father after all.
A stab of pride shot through him, though, when Ben clarified who he was and Baldric felt infinitely more amiable towards this woman. He dredged up a winning smile that bore just a hint of mischief and he took her hand in his, shaking it warmly, feeling the erratic thump-thump of her heart pounding in her fingers. He bit his tongue, willing himself to be sweet. That said, the desire to be monumentally sarcastic – My kids call me Professor Wood, actually, but let’s not split hairs – was raging within him but Baldric considered that the poor woman probably didn’t deserve snide!Gryffindor. No, instead, despite all his inner considerations of how snarky he should be and whether or not he actually believed in Cassandra Fern as an entity, let alone as a sincere woman, he wasn’t really going to be awful to her.
“Pleasure to meet you,” Baldric replied. He was imagining her when she wasn’t playing ‘Miss Fern.’ His mind, probably addled with potions, was running away with him a bit and he was speculating that she was secretly a dominatrix. Or, maybe, she had a really strange hobby. Whatever it was, Baldric was having far too much internal fun trying to figure it out. He wasn’t so wrapped up in it that he missed the exchange between her and his fiancé, however. Baldric’s brows lifted curiously. His hands slid from his pockets and he lifted his head up to look at the ceiling above their heads and then down at the woman’s shoes. His mother had imparted a few tricks of her trade, as it were, when it came to discerning people. When not letting his mind run away with him, Baldric could focus and he noted that you could tell a lot about people from the shoes they wore but, more importantly, about the roofs they put over their heads.
“How do you run this place normally?” He asked without really thinking his words over. “Income-wise, that is. The government?”
Baldric let Ben lead him off and it was probably for the best that he did so because Bae was already beginning to get a little bit antsy and desirous of going back to Glospie to dig out his tools from his father’s work shed. Then he wanted to come back and get up a ladder and dig leaves out of guttering and fix leaks and tinker with radiators so the children were warm and reseal the windows so that none of the heat that they needed would escape out through the gaps between the glass and frames. He wanted to tinker. He wanted to fix it all for them. He wanted them to be able to operate without any help and to give the children the lives they deserved and then, ultimately, homes, too.
Nevertheless, the corridor and Ben’s hand around his suitably distracted the Gryffindor and soon enough they were in a large common room where the children were playing. Bae felt his breath catch and he blinked rapidly before reaching to take the bag from his lover. Baldric stepped in a little more but didn’t move to approach any of the children who, understandably, were wide-eyed and somewhat stunned by the entrance of the two men. Baldric instead sank down onto the floor and sat cross legged with the bag in his lap. He looked up over the frame of his glasses at a group of little girls sat on a dull coloured rug with dolls in their laps and he smiled a bit before reaching inside the bag.
“What’s this?” Baldric whispered, glancing up to see the girls shifting a little, seemingly tempted by the mystery of the bag. He smiled and lifted out from inside a jam jar, complete with its red and white chequered lid. Confusion seemed to riddle its way into the little features of the first girl. In the bottom there were a few strips of paper and Baldric turned the jar over in his hands thoughtfully before shaking, imbuing it with some magic. Then, Baldric untwisted the lid and pushed the jar up, sending the paper up into the air. Purple sparks spun around the flutters and they took flight, dancing as birds over to the girls, dazzling about them and lifting their hair, tickling their cheeks and rousing giggles from within them.
Baldric felt his heart lift and an insatiable smile appeared on his face. He reached into the bag again and produced something a little bit more pertinent to what they were already playing with: two little outfits. He looked at them curiously and held them out to the nearest little girl, her red fringe dipping into her eyes as she turned to face him. She shuffled forward on her knees and held out her doll to him, letting Baldric take it from her hands. Then, with another bit of magic, the doll got a new dress and he handed it back to the little girl.
“There, she looks better, don’t you think?” He asked, touching his knuckles to her warm cheeks, watching as she stared at the doll wondrously. It was amazing what so little could do – how much good it could bring. “I think she could do with a hat, too.” He added, handing a small, doll-sized hat to the girl. She grinned and fixed it onto the doll’s hair before looking up at him gratefully. Baldric’s heart hammered within him as joy spread through his body. “Not bad, eh?”
by Baldric Pierson Sun Mar 01, 2015 1:01 pm
