Tidings of Tinsel

"Can you not do your homework at breakfast, mate?"

Christian looked up, surprised that he was being reprimanded for doing his coursework. But then he realized that his textbook was practically on top of Annie's plate. The brunette turned up her nose as he apologized and moved his book away, but the Northern Irish lilt met his ears again when an owl swooped down and landed on the edge of her plate, scattering the contents.

"Sorry!" Christian blurted again, his ears burning as he reached hurriedly towards his mother's owl, practically ripping the string away to snatch the parchment curled up there.

The black-feathered owl lifted off again, and Annie let out a high-pitched whine, turning and pushing herself off of the bench so she could storm off. Christian flinched, turning back to his mess and the letter he had received. When he unrolled it, his mood only fell even further. He re-read it, just to torture himself a little more, and decided he would tell Apollo later rather than sooner. Christian knew exactly what would happen with his brother and their parents. No one else would show up on Apollo's arm but her, and Merlin, that was going to be a nightmare.

And not just for Christian himself this time.

Sighing heavily, he tossed the letter on top of his textbook and turned back to his breakfast. It wasn't until he glanced Ace's way that he remembered what a scene he had made, sending heat back up his neck and around his ears.

Ace was staring at Christian when he finally gathered his bearings and remembered her presence. Her sausage was dangerously close to falling off of her fork as she held the utensil aloft, waiting with an expectant face for Christian to involve her.

He met her gaze a bit sheepishly and she could not help the small tone of excited expectation in her voice. "That was a trainwreck!" Right, perhaps a bit too pleased with the situation. Not exactly empathetic. Not the way friendships were supposed to work. She kept having to remind herself of that.

She set down her fork and sausage and wiped off of her hands. "Right, let's have a look then." And she reached across the table for this supposed disaster of a letter.

Christian narrowed his eyes, sending a glare Ace's way when she gave her opinion. She wasn't wrong, but she could have pretended otherwise, couldn't she? He figured, though, that she wouldn't have really been Alice if she hadn't commented. So he let it go for the time being.

He just shook his head, looking back down at his plate, grateful that he hadn't managed to destroy his own breakfast in the process.

She asked about the letter, reaching out, and Christian panicked. His hand flew out, snatching it away from her and drawing it up against his chest. His gaze darted to Apollo, grateful for once that his brother was distracted with a certain professor up at the long table. But then he focused in on Ace again, pushing the moment of fear to the back of his mind. It would only make Ace push harder if she felt the worry pulsing off of him.

"It's my mother," he explained finally. "She's decided to host a ball this Christmas. I, uh... I might have mentioned that Apollo met someone. And now it's going to be judgment day for her."

Christian let the guilt he felt sweep over his expression before he swallowed, albeit with difficulty. "I think we both know my parents won't be pleased."

Wrecked as he was over the accident, his Quidditch reflexes were still intact, and she felt only the ghost of parchment between her fingers as Christian hoarded the letter all to himself. She felt her nose wrinkle in displeasure, seeing absolutely no reason for the twin to retain any privacy from her. Hadn't she basically made him relevant again?

Besides. She hated being told no.

She stabbed a sausage and took a bite, lifting her gaze onto him and dulling her expression, as though nothing he could say could interest her. By the time he got to the word 'ball' she was convinced she had been right. There was nothing more useless to the youngest Longbottom than a Christmas ball.

She lifted an eyebrow at his words. "Isn't that... I dunno... a good thing?"

As far as she could tell, Lily Potter getting the Zabini seal of disapproval was a win-win for Christian... and for herself, for some reason.

She had a point. Ace usually did. But it was his own reaction that surprised him, not hers. Over the summer, her feelings about Apollo and Lily had been quite plain. Christian was pretty sure he had, too. Especially after Apollo started to move out. Now, they didn't really seem like brothers anymore except in that they looked so absurdly alike. Most, he knew, couldn't have told the pair of them apart unless one spoke more distinctively than usual, or they knew the boys particularly well.

But still. They weren't particularly similar anymore.

That didn't mean he wanted to hurt Apollo, though. Or Lily.

"Well," he began, pausing to figure out how he felt about it. "I don't know." Christian lifted a hand to his hair, pretending to scratch at the back of his head. Really, he just ran his first three fingers back and forth in a nervous twitch he didn't consciously realize he had. "Let's say Mum does as we both know she'll want to. She rejects Lily, Apollo blows up, and then poof. One or both of them are gone. And then what? Since when is Apollo the type to stop once he's offended?"

Christian shrugged, looking down at the letter again. "It could be really, really bad," he concluded, his gaze reaching for hers and settling there quite seriously. "I'm just not sure who it's the worst for, in the end."

At the first sign of his own indecision, Ace felt comfortable breaking eye contact to reach across the table and grab a biscuit. She cut it and pulled a butter disk over, cutting the biscuit and buttering it while Christian began to talk through the problem (or non-problem) at hand. Ace found her eyes wandering up towards Lily, who seemed intent on taking in every word from the History of Magic professor, her eyes firmly on the other professor, hands folded... right. Because if she let her eyes wander she might give herself away.

Ugh. Love was so gross. And dumb.

One of them gone sounded like a good deal for Ace, if it was Lily anyway. Not that she'd ever really be able to escape the Potter, but at least she would be gone from the influence of the Zabinis, and Ace and Christian could get back to saving the world.

But he had a point. If it was Apollo who ran off, Christian would probably feel obligated to go after them, and then Ace was without a partner yet again. As much as she wanted to just tell Christian not to worry about it, she knew her accomplice well enough to know he just couldn't do that.

"What if," she said, swallowing a bite of biscuit down, "You let them have their night... and then at the end of it, tell your mum they broke it off? Give them their dumb night out at the ball, and then they go back to being all secretive about it."

Deciding that the night of the ball was much too far away for him to ruin his meal because of it, Christian leaned forward and lifted a bite to his lips. He also set down the letter, figuring it couldn't do him any harm now that she knew what it was about.

Setting his elbow on the table to support him, Christian looked up at Ace again when she replied. "I guess so," he said after swallowing. "I don't know if that would really convince her, though."

In truth, he did know that their mother was more attentive to him as opposed to Apollo. But that didn't mean she wasn't observant or that she wouldn't be affronted if either of her sons - particularly the one destined to continue the legacy and take over the family in the future - decided to go against the so-called 'family values.'

He shrugged, glanced at the letter again, and then went back to his meal as he attempted to wave off the subject. "I'm sure we'll come up with something. We just probably shouldn't tell them before we talk to her."

Ace knew that if Christian were still overly agitated about the issue, that he wouldn't have been able to get back to breakfast, as half-hearted as the attempt now was. He was the sort to deny himself for as long as he could be helping others, so he fact that he was eating meant he had no plans to drop everything and fix this dilemma - yet. She still knew he could change his mind.

Best get a big breakfast down then. By lunch, she could be back on the clock.

"Worth a shot," was all she said, shrugging a shoulder as she took a bite of her muffin, enjoying the tangy burst of blueberry. She was reaching for another when Christian kept talking, and a point of contention suddenly became clear. She quickly swallowed down the muffin, eyes watering at the urgency of the action.

"Wait, wait, wait," she said, eyes squinting as though she knew better. "What's all this 'we' talk?"

Christian's expression when he met her surprise was one of simple, pure innocence. All wide eyes and indistinct confusion, he blinked and let his fork hover midair. It took him a moment, but when he found his voice it came with a look that clearly expressed some level of disappointment.

"Well, yeah. Who else would I ask to help?"

His brow furrowed as a bizarre feeling of rejection settled in his stomach. Surely, as his friend, Ace knew that it was her job now to get up to things like this with him? It brought on a sense of defensiveness on Christian's part, and he frowned at her, leaning forward on his elbows as they spread to either side of his plate.

"What, you don't want to go with me? It was your idea, after all."

Alice stared at Christian, her eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly, her lips pursed, that odd sense of concentration about her face that gathered in particularly sticky social situations in which she lacked the grace to handle herself. It seemed, when put on the spot, she always anticipated her own failure, having witnessed it firsthand time and time again. She was becoming accustomed to the bitter taste of a failed interaction, but still found, on occasion, herself so stumped as to not even make an attempt until her head was sorted out.

Her. Ace Longbottom. At a ball.

"Well, I mean, obviously you'd ask me, you're useless without me," she stuttered, forehead now considerable wrinkled in thought. He continued on and she lifted her head, blurting, "No, it's not- it was an idea. Not a plan. I..."

Merlin.

She settled on the first excuse she could find, and a good enough one considering she could not place her own hesitation. "I don't even have a dress. Or know how to dance. Or how to talk to rich people."