Remarkable Things

+++

“You’re gonna try them or are you just gonna stare at them like a virgin?” George says, raising an eyebrow.

Andrey flushes. By no means is he a virgin – it’s just that George’s new line of candy is obscenely realistic. The ‘Slippery Nipple’ looks like an actual miniature female breast, puckered skin and all. Though Andrey is more familiar with the anatomy of the ‘Flaming Cock’, which is an indecently shaped marzipan sweet, displayed in the 18+ section of the shop.

“I’ll try a… um, Slippery Nipple,” Andrey says and cannot help flushing a little as his fingers squeeze around a tiny female breast.

“Very sexy, Andrey,” George comments, shooting him an amused look. “But save the show for Verity, it’s gonna give her a heart attack. She’ll cherish the sight of you sucking on a nipple till the end of her days.”

“Shut up,” Andrey rolls his eyes. Verity and her obvious crush on him is getting a little bit annoying, considering Andrey has already tried all means of communication available to him to let her know he’s not interested, without resorting to being downright cruel. He changes the subject. “How’s Ron doing?”

“Fine. He’s taking Hermione to St. Mungo’s for another checkup today,” George tells him distractedly. He writes something down in his end-of-week report and takes a new batch of parchment rolls. “Merlin’s balls… everyone’s pregnant or getting married these days. I can’t believe I’ve already got three nieces and another three on the way before I’m even thirty.”

Andrey hums. No one in his social circle is pregnant or getting married, and he briefly wonders why that is.

“How is Sascha?” George asks without looking at him.

“Same as usual,” Andrey says vaguely, hauling himself up onto the cashier stand. Before Verity comes in, he grabs a ‘Flaming Cock’ from the shelf and sucks on the chocolate-covered tip, as George snorts at him. “Quit the ministry after only three weeks of work. Now he’s back to sulking on the sofa.”

“He and Percy should start a bloody club,” George says, shaking his head. “At least Sascha’s not a fan of Firewhiskey.”

No, Andrey thinks darkly – Sascha prefers a vastly different way of coping.

“Is he back at the Burrow?” he asks sympathetically.

“Yep,” George says, his voice sharp. “If not for the benders and self-pity parties, Mum would’ve been ecstatic.”

Andrey’s about to ask some more about Percy’s self-destructive tendencies, but the first customer of the day walks in. Andrey slips on his Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes jacket and gets to work.

+++

The crowd bursts with applause as Dania lifts the trophy, a swarm of well-wishers cheering and blowing kisses at him and his team as they parade through the air, a fireworks display of flashing cameras.

Dasha Kasatkina and Karen beam at him, hovering nearby on their brooms, and Gilles is sending colourful sparks from his wand in the air from the stands. The sound of the audience clapping and whistling and jeering is deafening.

Dania has beaten Alcaraz today – the best Seeker Chudley Cannons has ever seen, and only the second best after Novak Djokovic himself. Dania should be happy. He should feel proud.

He doesn’t.

Granted, beating Alcaraz hasn’t felt as good as beating Stefanos had or beating Holger Rune; and certainly not nearly as satisfying as beating Zverev had felt, time and time again, before—

Well. Before Dania and Karen became the only ones out of their Hogwarts year to still be playing professional Quidditch.

Getting the trophy now, after most of the people he’d been obsessed with beating left the sport, feels anticlimactic.

“I really want to thank my team,” Dania says in his speech, his voice amplified by a Sonorous Charm and booming over the pitch. “It is a team effort, and we wouldn’t have won this Cup without everyone here playing equally well!”

As the crowd applauds again, Dania thinks he sees a familiar face in the stands by the National Banner – a curly head, brown eyes, that piercing, knowing look—

He blinks, and the illusion is gone. There is no reason for Stefanos to be here, anyway, he reminds himself, swallowing through the bitterness. Just as it’s Karen’s turn to give a winner’s speech, Dania closes his eyes and breathes slowly, the practice like second nature to him by now. It’s only some leftover guilt expressing itself in some peculiar ways.

When he looks back to the same spot, it’s painfully obvious that the man looks nothing like Stefanos at all.

+++

He stuffs a couple of Slippery Nipples in his pocket in an attempt to cheer Sascha up when he gets home (and another Flaming Cock for himself), then stops at the Leaky Cauldron to get a few Butterbeers, too.

Then he Apparates straight to Godrick’s Hollow.

He tries to not look at the broom shed in the garden, but his eyes involuntarily catch on it, anyway. He bought this fancy house with a full-size Qudditch pitch back when he thought he’d be flying and practicing in his spare time, and now… even looking at the brooms, which he used to so lovingly polish and clean, puts him on edge.

Sascha is lying on the floor when he comes in.

“Come on, Sasch,” Andrey sighs, taking out his things from the pocket and unshrinking them back to their original size. “Will you get your arse up, at least?”

Sascha doesn’t say anything, not that he could at this state.

Andrey shows him a Slippery Nipple. “Look what I got you!” He holds it up under Sascha’s nose. “A treat for the for the good boy,” he adds and laughs at his own wit.

Slowly and like it’s hurting him, Sascha gets up on all fours and stares at him with those sad puppy eyes.

“Mate, come on,” Andrey pleads, and he is exhausted as it is without Sascha’s stubborn refusal to be a normal person. “I haven’t talked to you in about… a week? How long are you gonna keep this up?”

Naturally, Sascha doesn’t answer. Sighing, Andrey plops down on the sofa and rubs at his eyes.

A few moments later, he feels the cushions dip and a wet nose sniffing at his ear. Eyes still closed, he reaches out and pets Sascha on the head, scratches behind the fluffy ears. They stay like this for a few moments of quiet, then Sascha puts his head on his thigh and curls up. His tail is wagging ceaselessly as Andrey scratches his sides.

“If I wanted a dog, I’d have gotten one that wouldn’t eat all of my pumpkin pie,” he mutters, but the joke falls flat even to his own ears. He buries his fingers deeper into Sascha’s soft fur, right at the neck where the coat is all shiny and soft.

“Saw Malfoy by Fortesque today,” he says into the silence. “With his wife. Who is pregnant, by the way. Did I mention that everybody’s pregnant, apparently? George’s sister-in-law is expecting another one, and then there’s Ron and Hermione. And Harry, too, of course. And these are all kids who are younger than us by far. Yet no one from our year…”

His voice cracks, and he lets it fade out without finishing. No need to tell Sascha, he knows all about their year as it is.

“England’s won the United Cup,” he blabbers on just to fill the silence and create an illusion of a normal household. “I’ve no idea if you’ve been following Quidditch at all since… well. Dania caught the Snitch, beat Carlitos, who is, like, the best thing since Crum himself. Dania’s fourth trophy with the National Team.”

Sascha growls, fangs showing. Andrey feels it vibrating through his thigh where Sascha’s head is resting.

“Come off it,” Andrey rolls his eyes. He’s stopped petting Sascha’s head, so he gets a sharp-clawed paw smashing him in the ribs. “Ow! Bad boy!” Sascha releases a sound that could be a whine or a groan. “Merlin, Sasch, I’m not your service boy for pets and scratches!” He grumbles, though there’s no heat in it. He gets back to ruffling through Sascha’s thick fur. “Anyway. You sure you don’t want a Slippery Nipple?” Sascha releases a hearty puff. “Fine, suit yourself.” A burst of anger surges up suddenly, materialising as a hard clot lodged in his throat. He snatches his leg from under Sascha’s head and jumps to his feet. “You know what? I’ve had enough of this! You’re not the only one who’s going through this—this—”

His throat closes up. Without having to touch his face, he knows his eyes wet and bursting with long overdue tears.

Sascha looks up at him with his miserable dog-eyes, but instead of mellowing him out like it usually does, it only fuels Andrey’s anger. 

“If you bothered to remember, I was actually there, too! I lost people – friends, too, just like you did! But, unlike you, I am actually trying to move on with my life instead of hiding inside an animal body!”

If Andrey thought that these words would shame Sascha into transforming back to human, he thought wrong. Sascha just curls into a tighter ball, hiding his nose under his hind leg, effectively dismissing him.

Conversation over, then. Disappointed and angry, Andrey storms off to his room and falls onto the bed.

He wakes up some time later, when the room is already completely dark. He feels the mattress dipping and sighs, moving over to the side of the bed as Sascha climbs to settle down next to him. He turns in a circle a few times, like a proper dog, before lying down, his head resting on Andrey’s stomach. Without a conscious thought, Andrey runs his fingers through the fur between the ears and listens to Sascha’s content sighs. 

He reckons this would count for an apology, should Sascha have turned back human. As it is, he has to accept this half-measure and be grateful he at least has this.

He remembers all those stories from Muggle films – Beethoven, Lassie, My Dog Skip, The White Fang. The dog always died at the end, so he makes fists in Sascha’s fur and holds him especially close, buries his nose in the fur at his neck and breathes in, fierce and desperate. 

It’s always easier to touch Sascha when he is a dog. There’s precedent for it, anyway, it’s a narrative repeated and immortalised in hundreds of dusty paperbacks, a boy and his dog and their bond so deep and loyal that it matters more than anything else in the world. It makes sense for Andrey to love Sascha so much that it crowds out all his other feelings when he’s four-legged and trotting beside him, tongue hanging out and drooling on the floor. 

But when Sascha is a man – seldom though it might be these days – it frightens Andrey how much he needs him, how much he needs from him. How badly he still wants to touch him every moment, hold him close, bury his face into his neck and caress his skin rather than his fur.

+++

Dania’s not as famous as, say, Harry Potter, but he is at about the same level of fame as Ron Weasley or Hermione Granger, though for all the wrong reasons. 

Well, not that it’s wrong to be famous for being a world class Seeker, it’s just that he’d prefer it if the reason was a bit more… respectable. Like, for example, for saving the wizarding world. Or, failing that, for saving at least a single person during the Hogwarts Battle. 

But Dania wasn’t at the Hogwarts Battle. No, Dania was in Ireland, getting ready to play a Quidditch match at the time. 

“Mr. Medvedev!” Some Hogwarts-aged kids yell as they spot him by Flourish and Blotts. “Can we get an autograph?”

He swallows the typical annoyance he gets every time he is asked. It’s not these kids’ fault that he can’t manage his own guilt for missing the biggest and most vital battle scene of the century.

“Sure,” he says, forcing a smile. 

As he signs their pieces of parchment, his eyes survey the street. At first, he thinks he’s imagining things again – the man by the Apothecary cannot be Stefanos – but as he stares for longer, the image gets clearer than ever. 

Stefanos looks much thinner and shabbier than he did when they last saw each other, which must have been – Christ, has it really been over two years? 

His mouth goes suddenly dry, and he feverishly licks at his lips. There’s a trembling sensation spreading around his organs as if he was suddenly hungover. 

Stefanos is standing by the glass display, looking thoughtfully inside. Even in his plain-looking robes and a significantly slighter frame, he looks breathtakingly gorgeous. 

It takes him a long while to have a panicky inner debate on whether he should approach and say something – anything at all – so long, in fact, that when he blinks again the kids are gone and Stefanos himself is crossing the street, looking directly at Dania with a determined expression on his face.

Stupidly, he turns around last second, pretending he hasn’t seen Stefanos at all and cringing inwardly at his own foolishness.

“Hey, Daniil,” a painfully familiar voice says, the same voice that called him a ‘Daft Muggleborn’ once after a match all those years ago. 

Stefanos has been such a vivid figure in his mental universe that he is surprised and rather disappointed by the bland friendliness on his face when he looks up at him, as if Dania was any other well-meaning passerby.

Even though the voice hasn’t changed, the rest of Stefanos seems to him vastly different: his face is older and more mature, his eyes shrewder than ever, as if he was gazing straight into Dania’s soul and extracting his deepest secret simply by act of looking. The fact that is he is a little shorter than Dania doesn’t help the feeling of gazing up at Stefanos, as if Dania were a goblin or a common garden gnome. 

“Oh, hey,” he says lamely, failing miserably to sound casual and like he’s only just now noticed Stefanos. “How are you?”

Stefanos bites on his lip thoughtfully, seriously considering the question. “There’re good days and there’re bad days.” He nods gravely, as if to confirm his own words. “How have you been? I see you’re still playing Quidditch.”

It’s not a question, but Dania flinches all the same, as if he was accused of a crime. Rather guiltily, he looks down to find his hand still clutching his broom, his knuckles going white with the force of the grip. 

“Yeah, I’m—“ he swallows nervously, “I’m sponsored by Dragonfibre now, so…”

“Oh, interesting!” Stefanos proclaims. He sounds surprisingly genuine. “I visited their factory when I was in France. They make very good-quality brooms.”

“Yes, well.” Dania fidgets, wishing he were anywhere else. He has a distinct impression that Stefanos can read his thoughts as plainly as if they were written across his forehead, and the feeling is uncanny. “You’ll have to tell me about it some other time. I gotta—I must be going—”

“I read that you won the Cup,” Stefanos goes on as if Dania hasn’t spoken. “Good for you. I know how much you wanted it.”

“Um. Yeah. Thanks.” He shuffles awkwardly on his feet. “And how have you been?”

“You really want to know?” Stefanos says, again with the genuine disconcerting surprise. 

“Sure,” Dania says, unable to decide whether he is even lying. “We could meet up at a pub or… some other time, yeah?”

“Alright,” Stefanos says, boring into him. “I’ll probably be staying in England for a while.”

“Okay,” Dania mumbles as he keeps shuffling away from him. “See you!”

It’s after he’s left Stefanos on a sidewalk and hurried back to his own flat that he realises he’s forgot to buy the book he went for in the first place.

He doesn’t go back.

+++

In the morning, as soon as he opens the backdoor, Sascha runs out to sprint in the overgrown grass of the Quidditch field. It’s a nice day, the grass still covered in dew, and he watches Sascha zoom around the field, tongue billowing beside him. 

It’s not just any dog he turns into in his Animagus form – it’s a Borzoi, a breed made specifically for running. And running is all he does these days, his lean long form getting to speeds Andrey hasn’t thought possible for a dog. 

As he sips his coffee, a large silvery animal appears in the living room, so suddenly it nearly makes him spit out his drink. He points his wand at it like some PTSD-soldier, then lowers it, feeling ashamed and embarrassed of trying to curse a bloody Patronus.

“If you’re home, I could pop in for some tea?” the huge scary Patronus says in a soft and shy voice of Stefanos, so contrasting to its look. 

While Sascha’s still out enjoying his dog-life in the morning sun, Andrey sneaks an embarrassed glance out the window to make sure Sascha’s not watching. Then, sliding the curtain shut for good measure, Andrey conjures his own Patronus.

“We’re both home – do come in, it’s been ages!” he tells his Borzoi Patronus and watches it run and disappear through the wall. 

It’s mere minutes before there’s a knock on the door. Smoothing out his facial expression to look at least moderately cheerful, Andrey opens the door.

“Long time no see,” Stefanos smiles at him, shoving a box into his hands rather awkwardly. Andrey sets it aside for a moment in order to hug him, but Stefanos shuffles away, his shoulders tense. 

“What’s this, then?” Andrey asks him to cover up the awkward moment. 

“Powdered Minotaur’s horn,” Stefanos says brightly. “Straight out of Athens.”

“Is that where you’ve been?”

“Not exclusively,” Stefanos shrugs. His smile looks a bit plastic. 

“What am I supposed to do with a Minotaur’s horn?”

“Take some before bed,” Stefanos says, looking around the house with mild interest. “It’s supposed to be like Dreamless Sleep potion, only better – less side effects, no addiction.”

“Oh. Thanks,” Andrey mumbles, stuffing the gift away and out of sight. He doesn’t think Sascha has said something to Stefanos – as far as Andrey knows, Sascha hasn’t talked to him in about six months. But then, Stefanos doesn’t need to be explicitly told about the traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt. After all, Stefanos is something of an expert himself.

“Where’s Sascha?” Stefanos asks after his eyes have surveyed the entire room.

“Chasing his Pygmy Puff for all I know,” Andrey says and can’t help the bitter tone coming out.

Stefanos is no longer smiling his plastic smile. 

“Still a dog, then?”

“Yep,” Andrey says with a forced casualty to his voice. He rubs at his eyes, feeling like the world’s worst host. “You want something to drink? I’ve got butterbeer or—Firewhiskey if you want?”

“Firewhiskey, please,” Stefanos says courteously, and Andrey summons the bottle from the kitchen. He pours Stefanos a generous amount and is surprised to see him take it all down in half a gulp. Stefanos smiles at him shyly: “Firewhiskey doesn’t really do much for me anymore, not since…”

He winces, motioning vaguely with his hand, and Andrey nods gravely. “One of the… side effects?”

“I suppose,” Stefanos sighs, then forces a smile. “At least I can hold my liquor now.”

Despite there being a perfectly comfortable sofa in the middle of the living room, Stefanos nevertheless takes out his wand and conjures himself a chintz comfortable-looking chair.

Andrey rolls his eyes, but otherwise doesn’t comment. He plops down on his own sofa. 

“So how have you been?”

“Alright… I mean,” he sighs heavily. “All things considered…”

There’s an obnoxious scratching sound against the glass backdoor. Andrey huffs and gets up to let Sascha in. 

“Who’s a good boy?” Stefanos laughs, as Sascha jumps up and down, scratching him all over with his unmaintained claws, his tail wagging ceaselessly like an infinite-energy engine. He slobbers all over Stefanos’ hands, whining and whimpering and panting so convincingly that if andrey hadn’t known, he’d never once think it wasn’t a real dog in front of him. The thought grates on him, puts him on edge. 

He suddenly feels very alone.

“You gonna start licking your balls soon, too?” he snaps at the dog, who ignores him completely. “I swear you’re more dog than a man nowadays, Sasch!”

Stefanos’ smile slides off his face. He scratches Sascha behind the ears, “Aren’t you going to transform? We haven’t talked in months.”

But Sascha just looks at him with his dog-eyes, his tail finally sagging. Then he turns and trots over to the corner of the room where he curls up in a ball. 

“Do you know that spell that forces Animagi to reveal themselves?” he asks Stefanos pointedly and very loudly. Sascha growls and shoots him a glance from his corner. 

“I might ask my dad,” Stefanos says thoughtfully. “I’m sure he knows a countercharm to it, because he mentioned it to me once. He has to cast it each time upon himself before he transforms.”

“What’s his animal form?”

“It’s a parrot,” Stefanos says with a lopsided grin, as if that was an inside joke that Andrey was not privy to. He fixes Stefanos another portion of Firewhiskey. 

“You found a job yet?” he asks him once he’s settled back with his own glass, never mind that it’s barely nine in the morning.

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Stefanos smiles again, though for the first time since his arrival, it looks sincere. “Olivander is taking me in.”

“Really?” Andrey sits straighter, staring at him. “As a wandmaker?”

“As an apprentice,” Stefanos corrects. “Though, in good time, I hope I’ll get to be an independent wandmaker myself.”

“I’m really happy for you, Stef,” Andrey says with a genuine warm emotion, and they clink their glasses. “Isn’t that what you wanted to do since, like… you were a kid?”

“How do you know that?” Stefanos frowns.

“Dania told me, I think,” Andrey shrugs and carefully watches Stefanos’ reaction to the name. 

“Speaking of,” Stefanos says in a very odd tone, haltingly, as if he wasn’t sure if he should abort the sentence mid-word. “I saw him yesterday.”

“Who? Dania?”

“Yes.”

“Wow,” Andrey lets out a mirthless chuckle. “There you are, having been traveling Merlin knows where for the last year, and you got to see Dania just yesterday.” He snorts and takes a big gulp of Firewhiskey to wash out the unpleasant taste in his mouth. It stays. “Meanwhile, here I am in good old England and I haven’t seen him in more than a year. If you don’t count all the Prophet photos of him, of course.”

In the corner, Sascha makes an odd sound that almost sounds like a human snort. Andrey ignores him.

“It’s not like I had an appointment with him,” Stefanos points out, which – fair. “I just ran into him by accident. We had a very short conversation that seemed rather awkward to me.”

Despite himself, Andrey cracks up. “Oh yeah? How is he?”

“He looked… I‘m not sure. Troubled? Shifty?” Stefanos says with a thoughtful frown. “I just gathered that he was very uncomfortable. Probably because he was around me.”

“Nah, come off it,” Andrey says with conviction. “You haven’t seen each other in years. I don’t think there’re any hard feelings left.”

“That may be so,” Stefanos concedes, “but he still gave me a very distinct impression he’d rather be anywhere else.”

“He is,” Andrey huffs bitterly. “Anywhere else, I mean. I haven’t seen or talked to him since… well, since the Battle, almost. I’m pretty sure he’s avoiding me.”

“Because he’s feeling guilty?” 

“I don’t think he’s feeling guilty,” Andrey frowns. “Although, your guess is as good as mine. It’s not like I’m much of a Dania expert these days.”

Stefanos releases a sound that could be indecision or indigestion. Andrey doesn’t push the topic further.

“Sascha hasn’t been human in weeks,” he says instead, coming back to what’s really bothering him at the moment. Sascha’s ears jerk up at the sound of his own name, but he doesn’t otherwise move. “The stupid twat will soon forget he’s actually a person.”

“Andrey, he’s right here!” Stefanos says awkwardly, going red and unsuccessfully trying to cover his face up with his glass. 

“Not really,” Andrey snaps, looking directly at the dog, knowing that he’s listening. “He’s not really here, is he? Not in the way that counts.”

Stefanos sighs gravely. “We all deal with trauma in our own ways.”

“What’s yours?”

“I abandon my life and travel the world for a year,” Stefanos smiles but it’s a sad little thing that looks rather like a grimace. “Give him time,” he adds in a whisper, glancing at Sascha guiltily. “I’m sure he’ll come out of it.”

Andrey downs the rest of his Firewhiskey and says nothing. 

As Stefanos recounts his international travels, Andrey spaces out a bit, his gaze snapping to the Quidditch field outside the window. Here they are, all three of them – elite Quidditch players that were on top of the wizarding world only a few short years ago. Nothing is stopping either of them from opening Andrey’s broom shed, taking a fancy sponsored broom each and going for a game right this moment. 

And yet, none of them do it. They are not those people anymore.

Distantly, he wonders if he ever gets to be that person again.

+++

A day full of self-loathing later, Dania decides that reaching out to Stefanos might not be such an awful idea after all. What is the alternative either way? TV dinner after TV dinner, Firewhiskey, and maybe a few of his own bitter tears added into the mix.

He stares into the telly as he ponders this. Naturally, Muggle news will never report the calamity that was the wizarding war, but it’s still there, always there in the back of Dania’s mind. Every time he passes the Harry Potter monument in the Diagon Alley or looks at the Daily Prophet in the morning, or hears a whispered conversation in hushed, tragic tones. 

The memory of the wizards and witches who died in the Battle is a dark cloud hanging over the community. He’d see people having a hushed conversation on a street corner, or a witch touching another witch’s arm in the Flourish & Blotts, or a wizard wiping away a tear while he looked at the Weasley joke shop, and he’d think, Those kids who died.

An unbearable, insupportable weight of guilt always follows that thought.

What has he got to lose? 

It is easier now to look back at his choices after he lost almost everything, because there is no more pressure to make the right ones. The wrong steps were already taken. He already chose poorly.

He picks up a quill. 

He is not sending his message with a bloody Patronus. Not that he could, these days, either way.

+++

Andrey is covered in blood.

He’s had a general idea of how much blood there is in a human body, but he has never imagined he’d get to see just how much exactly — he stands shock-still, his wand hanging loose in his right hand, while his left is wiping bits and pieces of Felix from his face, which is an effect of a Bombardo spell that he didn’t even know could be used on a person, and the blood is dripping down his chin and roaring in his ears, drowning the rest of the sounds, drowning even the horrible, gut-wrenching scream of Denis and the cries of Avada Kedavra all around him – and he must move, just move Andrey, you’re gonna be hit with a curse, bloody hell, come on, come on, move movemove—

“No—” he chokes out, jolting up in bed. Blood is streaming down his face.

No no no. He wipes at it furiously, feverishly, before his brain kicks in and he realises that it’s not blood. He is crying. 

There is also a wet tongue sliding on his cheek, licking the tears away.

“NO!” Andrey yells, and his voice cracks. He pushes the dog away with all his might as the tears stream and stream down his face like someone has cast an Aguamenti on his eyes. Sascha whimpers as he hits the floor, but Andrey doesn’t care. His entire body is shaking with the aftershocks of the nightmare – and his heart is stuck right in his throat, making it impossible to breathe. “I don’t need—I need—” 

You, he wants to say, not a dog, but he’s choking on his sobs and his entire body hurts. Andrey’s heart thuds against his ribcage like a fist beating against a locked door, please, let me out, like his soul is trying to erupt out of him. The pain is everywhere: in his hands, in his ribs, in his eyes and even teeth, reverberating through every fibre of his being, and he needs—

And then there are hands – human hands – all around him, pressing him close, wiping the tears away with shaky fingers, a painfully familiar voice that he hasn’t heard in what feels like years whispering words of comfort in his ear. He shakes and shakes, hiccupping, crying so hard it feels like he is going to die from it. He hasn’t cried so hard since the Battle, and Sascha holds him, filling the air between them with warmth and the smell of a dog, and this is what he’s needed ever since— or maybe always, the need so bad and desperate he could cry with it.

“It’s alright,” Sascha whispers in his ear, his long arms wrapped tight around him. “It was just a nightmare.”

It wasn’t. Sascha knows perfectly well what nightmares mean to the both of them – and to the dozens of other people who were there that night – that they are not simply nightmares, but actual memories playing before his eyes in glorious technicolour. 

Sascha is no stranger to nightmares himself. The first time he turned into the dog while at Andrey’s was for the night – plagued by nightmares, he’d hoped he’d escape them in his simpler-minded dog form. But even these days, when Sascha is living mostly as a dog, Andrey wakes up at nights to see him whimpering in his sleep, his tail contracting between his legs. 

He grabs Sascha in return with as much force. The adrenalin is mostly gone by now, leaving him placid and loose, his limbs heavy. He lays back down against the sheets, never letting Sascha go, dragging him down along with him.

“Don’t turn,” he whispers in a voice that cracks. He hasn’t planned on begging, but it doesn’t seem so horrible now, under the cover of the night, while Sascha’s behind him and unable to see his face. The pressing need to voice this tramps all other considerations either way, drowns all shame and logic, leaving just this soul crushing desire for human contact. “Please. Just—stay like this, please.”

Sascha doesn’t reply, but Andrey feels his heavy sigh where his chest is pressed against Andrey’s back. 

Gradually, he falls asleep. When he wakes in the morning, Sascha is gone. 

+++

Dania’s jerked awake by an insistent knocking on the window, and as soon as his foggy vision clears, he recognises Dimka — Andrey’s ginger owl. For a long moment, he lets his hopes get up — has Andrey written to him? — but upon opening the letter, it’s obvious that the handwriting is too neat and tidy to be Andrey’s.

So, Stefanos is staying with Andrey, then? 

He feels the bitterness in his teeth.

With a start, he remembers ten-year-old Andrey’s plan to get his parents to adopt Dania. They weighed up their respective parents' merits and ruled in favour of the Rublevs, because Mr Rublev laughed more and Mrs Rublev made the better biscuits. They magnanimously decided to grant the Medvedevs visitation rights to their son on alternate weekends.

The real life has turned out far less brotherly. The last time he saw Andrey was when he asked Dania if he was coming for the Commemoration Night at the ministry, and his tone was distant and dry. It’s a small event, he said, just friends and family.

Sure, Dania said slowly, hearing the message loud and clear: he was not needed. Family only, and he didn’t make the cut those days. It wasn’t news to him, but it stung nonetheless.

But would he have done had he chosen to go? Attempting to mingle with all those brave heroes of the Battle, mourning their lost loved ones and their own childhoods, while Dania would awkwardly nod and pretend he understood what that felt like?

There was no place there for someone like him — a glorified Quidditch player with no particular skills or achievements outside of the sport.

The irony is not lost on him: he has dedicated his entire life to getting to belong — first theMoscow Academy, then France and Beauxbatons, then Hogwarts and its unhealthy obsession with blood status. He’s spent so much time to master Quidditch and Occlumency, to become one of the best Seekers in England in his quest to belong to this community and prove to everyone willing to listen that he, Daniil Medvedev from Russia, deserved to be here, deserved to play in the English national team and to walk along the Diagon Alley like every other wizard there.

Only for all of that to be over because of one wrong choice he made when he was twenty-one.

He has never felt like he belonged less.

Hey Daniil, Stefanos has written, it was nice to hear from you again. I don’t have a place in London yet (or anywhere in England), so I’m currently staying with Andrey and Sascha. If you want to meet, I suppose we could go for Diagon Alley or Muggle London — I haven’t been to Hyde Park yet and would really like to see the swans! Either way, I would be happy to meet anywhere you choose.

Let me know the Apparition coordinates if you do choose Muggle London, as I am afraid, I have no knowledge of the area yet.

All the best,
Stefanos Tsitsipas.

Daniil scowls at the last line. Why would Stefanos write his surname like it was some official Ministry letter? Or did he think Dania has forgotten his last name? Did he want to distance himself from Dania?

He spends the rest of the day ignoring the letter and trying to convince himself he doesn’t need it, doesn’t need Stefanos Tsitsipas in his life again, especially since Stefanos is so happy traveling the world, chatting up Harry Potter in Hogsmeade and crashing with Zverev in Andrey’s fancy house in Godric’s Hollow.

The sounds of gunshots and artful explosions coming from the telly jerk him out of his depressive thoughts. Dania stares at it blearily, realising that he's dozed off with the TV dinner balanced on his lap. An exquisite news anchor is gravely informing the world that one Muggle community is making a spirited attempt to blast another community of Muggles off the face of the Earth.

Nothing ever changes, Dania thinks heavily and abandons his pretence.

Hey Stefanos, he writes. The gunshots on the telly fade into the background.

+++

Come morning, Sascha has left the bed. Blearily, Andrey gropes around the bedsheets trying to find his dog form, but the other half of the bed is empty and cold.

The sounds coming from downstairs at least ease his anxiety that Sascha has left the house altogether in the midst of the night, so he gets dressed and trudges dutifully downstairs.

Sascha is in the kitchen. Glancing up at him, Andrey does a double take, because—

Sascha looks shaggy and unkept, his hair and beard way past what’s considered appropriate in a decent society. He pauses upon seeing Andrey, coffee cup in one hand and wand in the other, practically levitating into view like a wayward spirit haunting Andrey’s house. He looks some bygone Muggle surfer stereotype, the only thing missing is a sharktooth hemp necklace and a big-titted blonde hanging on each arm. The image is at once so vivid and absurd in his head that it makes Andrey crack up and he nearly bumps into the doorway on his way in.

Sascha stares at Andrey with a lost expression like he's just decided to materialise and move his relatively benign poltergeist-slash-surfer activities into the kitchen, dog smell hanging about him like ectoplasm.

“You—“ Andrey starts, feeling his lips pull into a smile, never mind Sascha’s ridiculous sorry appearance and smell.

Andrey feels it then — the house changing, its magic breathing. A once empty cottage drawing its first breath with the presence of another, and Andrey feels something in his chest beginning to fill in like a cold beach dug hole caving in with warm smooth sand. Loneliness running out with the tide.

“Yep.” Sascha takes a gulp of his coffee. “It’s been too long. Almost forgot where I left my wand.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to grace me with the presence of your stupid human self for once,” Andrey grins and levitates a cup of coffee for himself. “I almost forgot what you looked like.”

Sascha snorts but stays otherwise silent. It’s typical of him to be less than taciturn immediately upon turning back, especially after particular long periods of staying in his Animagus form. He’d stare of into space, forget his wand lying around at odd places, spend hours at a time standing in the grass pitch outside looking at the sky. Andrey has learnt to let him.

“Is Stef still sleeping?”

Andrey blinks, only now remembering there’s a third person with them in the house. Among all his nightly anxieties and morning surprises, he has completely forgotten Stefanos has been staying with them.

“Apparently,” he says, taking a sip of his coffee and then barely holding himself from spitting it back out, it’s so horrible. Sascha catches him wincing.

“What?”

“Learn to make decent coffee, will you?” Andrey says, vanishing it with his wand. “That was disgusting.”

“I’m not your bloody House Elf,” Sascha grumbles, looking perfectly content to drink his own gooey mess that tastes like Pixie crap.

“And take a shower,” Andrey adds, needling him for good measure. He’s about to expire from ecstasy at having Sascha back in his lanky skinny form, not that he is going to let Sascha know. “You smell like dog.”

Sascha rolls his eyes and goes on with his coffee-drinking. Andrey moves to the side, approaching the window, but it’s only an excuse to stare at Sascha from afar where he can’t see Andrey drinking him up like a starved man.

He looks lost, standing there in the kitchen, and a little aloof. It has never factored with Andrey, mostly because his grief for Felix and Grigor and his own ambitions and dreams has made him so muddled that he didn't try to comfort Sascha in his. Andrey has come to realise that Sascha must appreciate that, because Sascha certainly never liked talking about his feelings, or in fact anything much except his crazy ideas and what Andrey was doing.

“Hey, is that Dimka?” he says, spotting a ginger owl in the sky. “Back already! That was quick!”

“Where did he fly to?” Sascha says, finally snapping his gaze away from his mug.

“No idea. Stefanos asked to borrow him to write someone a letter.”

Sascha hums noncommittally. Andrey opens the back door to let Dimka in and then deliberates on whether he should snoop and read the name of the sender.

“Are you five?” Sascha snorts, as if reading his mind. “If you wanna know, just ask him. It’s not like Stef is very familiar with the concept of keeping a secret.”

“I wasn’t going to look!” Andrey lies. The next moment he hears footsteps from the stairs and tramps the instinct to hide the letter behind his back like a guilty schoolboy caught in the dirty act. “Hey Stef! A letter for you.”

Stefanos looks a bit better than he did when he first showed up — his skin losing the sickly grey shade to it, his eyes brighter and livelier.

“Oh,” Stefanos’ eyebrows shoot up. “Daniil replied already.”

At the corner of his eye, he sees Sascha wrinkle his nose. Stefanos takes the letter carefully, as if it was something fragile and sacred, and only then notices Sascha’s human presence.

“Oh,” he says again and smiles. “You are back!”

“Never left,” Sascha frowns, but he’s not looking at either of them.

“Yes, you did,” Stefanos says stubbornly. “But I’m glad you’ve emerged from your self-pity.”

Sascha shakes his head, takes his mug of goo and steps outside, closing the glass door behind him. His wand lies forgotten on the kitchen counter.

+++

Dania decides on Hyde Park, after all. He’s the one who has initiated this meeting, so Stefanos might as well enjoy himself.

In any case, it’s nice to be out of the wizarding world for a change.

Technically, being a famous Seeker, he was supposed to sign himself up at the Ministry Office before showing his face in such a populated Muggle area for safety reasons, but that is one of those regulations nobody pays much attention to anymore, a holdover from a more orderly and obedient time. Dania had only been in the English National Team for a year before the Battle of Hogwarts, but he still has a vivid memory of what it was like back then, the coaches serious and demanding, the players focused and motivated, full of energy. Nobody drank Firewhiskey in the locker rooms; you could get suspended for simply saying the wrong thing. People walked faster in those days — at least that’s how he remembers it — and they always seemed to know exactly where they were going.

These days, the wizarding community is drowning itself in its collective grief and mourning, almost two years after the Battle, with no plans on ever moving past it. 

Alternatively, it’s a chance for Dania to experience the London Tube again and even a Muggle double-decker bus. These days he prefers walking everywhere or getting a taxi if the walk is too demanding. Here, in the park, he can allow himself to stroll leisurely along the ponds and freshly cut grass of the London Park, where no one knows his face and not a single person is going to ask him why he wasn’t there for at the Battle.

As Dania is gazing at the huge white swans demanding food from the tourists, a light touch on his elbow jerks him back to reality.

“Hey,” Stefanos says quietly. When Dania turns to him, he is looking at the magnificent birds, too, not even a glance at Dania. “I’m glad you chose Hyde Park.”

“Your wish is my command,” Dania mutters, immediately feeling awkward. Why is he even here? What is there to talk about, when the two of them had nothing in common anymore, couldn’t lead any more vastly different lives?

Stefanos spends another long moment gazing at the swans, then finally snaps his eyes in Dania’s direction.

“How are you?”

And Dania hears this question dozens of times a day, every day, from vastly different people. Yet, it never quite sounds like this – the way Stefanos is asking him – serious and curious and sincere. 

He swallows past a sudden clot in his throat, but the words never come, so he just shrugs instead.

Stefanos gives him an appraising stare, as if gauging the state of him merely by the clothes he’s wearing or by the level of fussiness of Dania’s hair. Seemingly having gathered all the necessary information, he turns back to the pond. 

“Yes, well,” he says very quietly. “I’m not exactly very splendid myself.”

He steps closer to the shore, where a whole bunch of greedy swans are screeching and flapping their huge wings. Upon Stefanos approaching them, though, they immediately hop back into the water, as if frightened. 

Stefanos looks sadly after them, his face so miserable, Dania’s heart goes out to him despite himself. 

“How are you?” he asks Stefanos just as quietly. Around them, numerous tourists bustle, laugh, and take pictures, throwing bread into the water for the swans and duck to fight over. The noise feels like sandpaper against his ears. “Where have you been all this time?”

“Here and there,” Stefanos says vaguely, tilting his head. “All over Europe and Asia. Went back to Greece to see my parents.”

“What were you doing?” Dania asks him, taking a step towards him. This close, Stefanos’ magic brushes against him like a lover’s breath, soft and warm and intimate, tingling his every nerve. Dania’s mouth goes dry, and the hair on the back of his neck stands with goosebumps. He has never felt a magic so potent, so powerful, yet so… dark? There’s something dangerous, something almost tragic in it as it wraps around Dania’s mind, penetrates him so deeply and profoundly he can barely keep himself upright.

“I was looking for something,” Stefanos says mystically.

Dania breathes out slowly, trying to disentangle himself from foreign magic. “Did you find it?”

“No.” Stefanos smiles, but it doesn’t look like a smile. “I didn’t.”

Silently and simultaneously, as if in a practiced choreographed move, they start walking. It’s a misty wet afternoon, typical for London in its never-ending foggy depression. Dania thinks he can see the vague shape of the sun hiding between thick layers of gravely grey clouds, if he looks hard enough.

“I’m looking for a place,” Stefanos says as if they were in the middle of a conversation. Dania looks up at him in vague surprise, feeling all out of sorts, suspended in this strange moment of detachment. “Do you know any place that would suit me?”

Dania has never had a particularly vivid imagination, but to imagine a place that would suit Stefanos with all his quirks and peculiarities might require a professional fiction writer. Somehow, Dania keeps getting images of wild lush gardens full of magical plants and creatures, where both a Veila and a Dementor wouldn’t feel out of place.

“I’ll ask around,” he says, while something pulls at his lower belly, almost painful. “You’re looking for something fancy?”

“Merlin, no,” Stefanos says and snorts in a very un-Stefanos-ish way. “I barely earn enough to feed myself.”

“But--” Dania stumbles, feeling guilty for no reason. “You were an elite Quidditch star, surely--”

“That is all over now,” Stefanos says with a note of finality. “And I spent it all on my travels, anyway.”

Dania stares at him, struck speechless. Stefanos rose to stardom faster and surer than Dania did back in the day – a young Seeker that beat the all time greatest of the sport, the likes of Djokovic and Krum and Roger Federer himself, while Dania was still trying to get into any third-tier team that would have him. How on earth is Stefanos low on money now?

“Excuse me,” Stefanos says politely as a young couple with a dog bump into him on the walkway. The couple don’t pay him any mind, but what catches Dania’s attention is the dog that growls at Stefanos and backs away from him like a wild cornered animal.

What’s even more interesting is that Stefanos looks heartbroken for it.

“Hey, it’s just a random dog,” Dania hears himself say, as Stefanos’ magic surges up again, darker and more desperate than before. “Animals love you, come on.”

Stefanos merely shakes his head, frowning at the ground.

“I’ve seen you with a dog, it seemed really into you,” Dania adds, inexplicably desperate to make him feel better – or maybe it’s just Stefanos’ freaky magic rubbing off on him. He recalls that time he saw Stefanos with a giant dog of some Russian running breed, running around the Quidditch pitch just before a match. 

“That wasn’t a real dog,” Stefanos mutters and doesn’t elaborate. Which only raises more questions. “Besides, it’s not only dogs. All kinds of creatures cannot stand me now.”

“What? Why?”

Stefanos shakes his head again with a frustrating finality, effectively putting an end to this line of questioning.

“Speaking of animals,” Stefanos says in a conversational tone, and for the first time, his smile reaches his eyes. He looks sideways at Dania with a mischievous expression that is a sharp contract to the moody one he had before. “How is your Patronus these days?”

“Ha ha,” Dania says flatly, though the heavy mood is heavily broken now and he is happy enough about it to latch onto any subject, albeit such a humiliating one. “I wouldn’t have shown up had I known you would bring that up!”

Stefanos chuckles, seeming very pleased with himself. “You were so dramatic. That was quite a tantrum for a tiny hamster.”

“Yes, well,” He feels himself flushing, even all these years later – the shame still rooted deep inside him, wrapped around his organs and impossible to take out. I had a crush on you, he thinks, but even the thought feels fake. 

I was in love with you, he tries, and yes, that feels much more honest, not that he is about to voice it. How pathetic would that sound? That in a life full of fame and glory and luxury, the best thing that has happened to him was a not-quite-relationship in his teenage years? The love that got mercilessly mocked and shamed by the worst people to ever walk the earth – other teenagers. 

It should have seemed funny now – an anecdote of his teenage years that got retold again and again for years to come – but it somehow isn’t. Instead, the memory of that day – the entire class laughing at him, Dania frozen, shamed, vulnerable, so so vulnerable, about to implode from humiliation – still haunts him to this day. He can feel the shame and bitterness just as clearly as if the whole thing only happened last afternoon. 

Dania hasn’t cast a Patronus ever since that day. He knows he won’t be able to even if he tried.

“I haven’t--” he says and stops, wondering why on earth he is even saying this. But Stefanos shoots him a curious look, so he goes on: “I don’t know what it is now.”

He doesn’t want to say any more, but Stefanos looks like he’s understood, heard the unsaid words just as clearly. He’s always had this uncanny ability to glimpse straight into Dania’s soul without the need for a wand. 

He used to wonder how Stefanos managed to seem so unaffected, especially the day Dania saw him talking to Harry Potter, as if they were old friends. Stefanos looked calm and balanced, as if all was right with the world, when it so obviously wasn’t. 

It’s not that Dania disapproves. Far from it. He just can’t figure out how it is possible that Stefanos could get over the Battle and its consequences while Dania remains haunted by it and by all of its victims looming over him day after day – people he barely knew and probably wouldn’t have recognised if they bumped into each other on any given day.

But that is how it is. He thinks about those people all the time. If anything, his obsession deepened when he returned to Quidditch after the league resumed, a few months after the Battle. Dania still carries the Daily Prophet issue of the morning after the Battle, listing all the deaths and providing pictures — and he looks at it dozens times a day, chanting the names of the deceased in his head like some kind of mantra: Lupin, Tonks, Weasley, Brown, Patil, Shapovalov, Thiem, Auger-Aliassime, Thomalla, Creevy, Dimitrov, Smith, Snape, Lupin, Tonks, Weasley— 

It is the reason his magic is still flunking out despite all the Occlumency practice, the reason he is avoiding Andrey, the reason he no longer laughs and goes out for a pint with his teammates, the reason he can no longer imagine his own future.

His life is populated by a different kind of ghosts now, and he is deadly afraid to become one of them.

+++

To Andrey’s great delight, Sascha is still human when he comes back from work. He is slouching in the armchair by the glass door, gazing unseeingly at the empty Quidditch pitch outside. 

“Got you another Slippery Nipple,” Andrey says to him or, rather, at him. Sometimes it’s like talking to a wall or any other inanimate object. Sascha doesn’t react, doesn’t acknowledge Andrey in any way.

“Saw Luna Lovegood today,” Andrey keeps talking, walking into the kitchen. He puts the Slippery Nipple sweets down on the counter in case Sascha deigns to finally try one, after all. “She came into the shop today. I’ve never noticed, but guess who she reminds me of?”

“Stefanos?” Sascha speaks at last, still not looking at him.

“Exactly,” Andrey says and stands still, staring into the back of Sascha’s head. “Both of them are… this specific kind of weird. Is it a Pureblood thing? You’re a Pureblood, though, and you’ve never been this — what am I saying, you’re the daftest and maddest twat I’ve ever met… Maybe we should put Luna and Stefanos in touch, do you think?”

He ends his tirade with a question on purpose in order to get Sascha to engage in a conversation with him. It works, because at last Sascha snaps his gaze to him.

“Stefanos is not particularly into witches,” he says with raised eyebrows. “Pureblood or otherwise.”

“I meant platonically!” Andrey grins, pleased with having a normal conversation for once, and though just a normal friendly conversation is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, it could be a stepping stone to... well, not happiness exactly, but a breadcrumb trail to lead Sascha away from that frightful edge he's been toeing ever since they fell back together. Ever since he was born maybe.

There’s silence for a long while after that, Andrey bustling around the kitchen and waving his wand to make the dishes clean themselves, thinking distantly that maybe he should look into getting a House Elf — he’s never liked having to cook, while even though Sascha likes to make attempts at it — he’s never learnt to do it well enough for his food to be remotely edible, having grown up in a home with a House Elf.  Neither of them knows the relevant spells to make food, so they have to make do with the Lonely Wizard dinners that only require a heating charm or suppers made entirely out of Butterbeers and sweets from George’s shop.

“Rain,” Sascha says suddenly, sniffing the air like a dog. It’s a habit that never quite goes away, no matter which body Sascha inhabits. 

And sure enough, less than a minute later there’s a sudden downpour that rattles against the roof. 

“Come on,” Sascha says sharply, standing. He turns to look Andrey in the eye. “Let’s go.”

“Go… where?”

“Outside.”

Perplexed, Andrey follows Sascha through the glass door and out into the back garden. He is immediately soaked, heavy droplets streaming down his face. He blinks them away and reaches for his wand to cast the Impervious charm, but Sascha grabs his wrist.

“No. Leave it.” 

His voice is almost drowned by the noise of the downpour, the incessant drumming of the rain against the trees, the plants, the ground. He stares in bewilderment at Sascha, feeling out of sorts and more than a little surreal, standing out in the rain and getting soaked to the bone, while Sascha closes his eyes and turns his face up to the skies. 

“I wonder,” Sascha says quietly, though somehow Andrey still hears him well enough through the storm, “where do the souls that got sucked by a Dementor go?”

Andrey feels his heart skip a beat. The air around him smells fresh and alive, so of course, Sascha would bring up the dead. Or rather—

“I don’t know. Nobody does.”

“Do they go to heaven?” Sascha goes on listlessly. “Do they just… cease to exist? Like all vanished objects?”

“Sasch,” he says – yells through the rain, “stop it! It wasn’t your fault she--”

“I dream about her every night,” Sascha says, his eyes going darker, as if a light switched off inside him. “I’m always trying to find her. I’ll be running through a maze, screaming her name, or tiptoeing through the Forbidden Forest, looking behind every tree. It’s got to the point I don’t even want to go to sleep anymore. Sometimes I write her letters, you know, just telling her what’s going on around here. Last month after work, I got so hammered, I went to Dean’s parlour and tried to get her name tattooed on my forehead. Thank Merlin, Dean wouldn’t do it — he’s the only reason I’m not walking around with her name written on my face.” Sascha looks at him. It almost feels like he is pleading. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

Andrey nods, blinking away the cold raindrops, “Yeah, I do. I know you loved her—”

“I didn’t,” Sascha says strangely. “I don’t think I have it in me, to be honest.”

“Have what in you?”

“Love,” Sascha frowns at the pouring sky as the sound of thunder rolls in the distance over the forest. “I don’t think I love anyone. Think I never could.”

“That’s utter bollocks, Sasch!” Andrey yells, as the rain prickles and burns in his eyes. “Of course you can love, you’re not some bloody psychopath! I know you are hurting, but it wasn’t your fault that she--”

“Shut up!” Sascha snaps at him. His eyes seem almost black now, glittering with something wild and hungry.

“But it wasn’t!” Andrey yells, stepping closer.

“Shut the fuck up, Andrey!” Sascha glares at him with those dark wild eyes, but there’s a desperation there too, a kind of desperation Andrey easily recognises having seen it in the mirror every single day for the last two years.

“You can keep on trying to hide from yourself instead of—”

He nearly falls over from shock as his tongue gets firmly and immovably stuck to the roof of his mouth. He stares at Sascha in disbelief – he hasn’t even seen him grab his wand — but apparently, Sascha has cast a nonverbal Tongue-Tying curse on him. 

Fine! Andrey mouths at him mutinously, turning back to the house. Suit yourself!

Back indoors, he casts a Finito on himself and a drying spell over his hair and clothes, then a heating charm over his freezing hands. Then he pours himself a glass of Firewhiskey and downs that, too, just to feel some warmth inside, artificial though it might be.

An hour later, a wet dog steps inside. Andrey glares at it, and then goes back to his room, shutting the door behind him.

+++

“What do you think?” Stefanos asks him, as if it was Dania who was going to be living in this flat.

“Does it matter?” Dania says, eyeing the shabby rickety furniture and the ugly paintings lining the walls. He’s glad he is not the one moving in – he’s seen worse places, yet this one… he doesn’t want to be looking at it.

“I’d appreciate your opinion,” Stefanos says, waving his wand over the wall, as if trying to find some secret passage.

Dania sighs. “Fine. I think it’s a shithole. You need to find something decent.”

The windows are so filthy no light is getting through them. He feels as though he is barricaded inside a tomb.

“Hmm,” Stefanos frowns at the empty wall. He doesn’t seem to have heard Dania at all. “Do you feel that?”

Dania stares. “Feel what?”

“Over here,” Stefanos points at the spot on the wall where the paint has peeled off. “An imprint. It’s rather… nasty.”

“I don’t feel anything,” Dania frowns, which is strange considering he’d felt Stefanos’ magic just fine before. Should he be sensing whatever it is that is bothering Stefanos now? “Is it Dark magic?”

“No,” Stefanos says, waving his wand in increasingly more complex movements. “Just… a lot of shame. Disgust. Self-hatred.”

Dania feels odd, dizzy. Stefanos is not insulting him, but inexplicably it feels like every word out of his mouth is accusing Dania of a crime.

He knows fuckall about me, he thinks angrily and then blinks, wondering where the anger has come from.

Coward, comes a clear whisper from somewhere behind him, and he whips around.

“What?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Stefanos frowns.

He is watching Dania closely now. “Interesting art,” he comments, pointing to the shattered frames.

Dania forces himself to look at it, but barely for a second, before turning away. The ugly people on the paintings are twisted and mutilated, so much so he can’t even tell their faces apart. Their tortured eyes stare back at him eerily, and he can’t get rid of the feeling that he knows all these people, would recognise them if only he could bring himself to look into their faces more clearly.

Useless cowardly squib, he hears again — this time the voice coming from inside the walls. Stefanos doesn’t react. Instead, he is looking under the desk at an ancient Hogwarts broom that wasn’t there a minute ago, Dania is sure.

He shivers. His heart is racing. He can feel it again, like in his dreams, pressing in all around him. He doesn’t like where this conversation is heading, or if it’s even heading anywhere at all. There’s an animalistic fear that’s been growing in him all day that makes him want to back into the corner of his own bedroom and never come out in case the sky falls down on him. He wants to leave this flat.

“I don’t like them,” he tells Stefanos, looking away. The floor is filthy, his feet sticking to it and every step producing a nasty sound. “Who the hell would paint something so fucking ugly?”

Stefanos just keeps watching him closely, and the scrutiny is starting to put Dania on edge.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dania spots something small and jittery running around the dirty floor. He squints at it: a hamster. It’s tiny and thin, and it looks like it’s dying from some horrible decease, its fur coming out off its sides. It moves slowly, as if in pain, and Dania’s nostrils fill with the stench of decay.

“What—” He turns to Stefanos who is watching the hamster, too.

Stefanos wasn’t supposed to see, he thinks with a panicky dread, feeling his magic unfurl and swell inside him, Stefanos wasn’t supposed to know—

“It’s alright,” Stefanos says, raising his hands. He speaks in a low voice, as if addressing a wild skittish animal. “I know what you feel—”

“You know nothing!” Dania screams at him. Distantly, he feels himself shaking, or maybe it’s the world coming undone around him. The walls of the flat are vibrating, the floor moving under his feet. He waves his wand at the wall but, horrifyingly, nothing happens. “What the fuck would you know, you perfect little—you—you—“

“Don’t be angry, please,” Stefanos says, and his face looks naked and vulnerable. “I’m only trying to help…”

“What?” Dania screams again. He squeezes his eyes shut. Everything around him is shaking. The wall to his right is cracking, a huge crevice splitting it in two. Worthless coward, comes from the crevice, the voice getting louder by the millisecond, fraud! “Shut up!!” He yells at it. He casts a Silencio charm on it, but nothing ejects from his wand, clenched uselessly in his hand. He feels sick to the stomach and so, so fucking helpless—

“I’m the one helping you! I’m only here to help you look at the flat—”

“Dania,” Stefanos says very softly, and his voice seems to be ringing inside Dania’s head. “How did you get here? Where are we?”

“I—We—“ But he can’t think of a reply – he just is there, in this dusty old flat, because he was supposed to help Stefanos find a new home, and before that he was—

“Try to calm down and remember,” Stefanos’ voice booms inside his head, and it’s too much all at once — the walls are coming down around him, the floor shaking and opening up, about to swallow him or make him fall down into the abyss—

He drops to his knees. His ears are ringing, heart thundering against his ribcage. Tears are streaming down his cheeks — and he can’t remember the last time he cried, let alone sobbed this hard, like his soul has been ripped out of him.

“Hey, hey,” he hears, and then a hand gently grips his shoulder.

He looks up. Stefanos’ worried face is frowning down on him.

“What—how—“

“Just breathe,” Stefanos says and hands him something. Dania looks down to see him putting a chocolate into his hand. “Calm down, it will all come back to you in a moment.”

Shoulders heaving and breathing erratic, Dania looks around. He is in his own living room, kneeling on the carpet.

Mind racing, he tries to remember how he got here. He can’t remember waking up or having breakfast, but images of Stefanos keep flashing before his eyes. He went to meet Stefanos again, he remembers suddenly, and everything starts to clear up. He talked to him about—about—

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, as shame floods him anew. “Is that what Legillimency feels like?”

“Its softcore version, yes,” Stefanos says with a small smile. “Have some chocolate. I’ve been told it helps a great deal.”

“That was softcore?” Dania demands, reeling. To put some kind of barrier between them, he stuffs a piece of chocolate into his mouth and forces himself to chew. “I’d hate to see you try a hardcore version, then.”

“Daniil,” Stefanos says with unbearable sympathy, and something pulls at his heart when Stefanos doesn’t say Dania like he did in a—

“Wait,” he cuts in, panic surging up anew. “Did you… did you see everything I saw?”

Stefanos looks like he’s choosing his words very carefully. “Well. Like I said, it was a light version of the spell, so I didn’t get to feel your current emotions or see your memories. Only the things that your subconsciousness created in that scene.”

“You—“ he chokes on the words, shame flooding his system like a wonderdrug. Why the fuck did he think this was a good idea?! Why would he think that letting Stefanos into his mind would make things better in any way, except for expose his pathetic self-pity and general ineptitude for the world to see?

“Daniil,” Stefanos starts again in that soft sympathetic tone that sets Dania’s nerve endings on fire. “You’ve got a lot of… pain inside your mind. As a matter of fact — and I’m not saying I’m an expert or a Legillimens master – but yours was still one of the most disturbed minds I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks,” Dania snaps, unable to look him in the eye.

“I mean it,” Stefanos goes on. “I’ve seen less traumatised minds of even some of the Battle survivors—”

The words start a nuclear explosion inside of him. It’s like Stefanos stabbed him with a knife in the middle of the chest and then went on twisting it slowly and torturously, rubbing it in that Dania wasn’t there, that Dania chose not go, that he didn’t deserve to be traumatised by his fucking lack of trauma. 

He wants to Disapparate, but he is at his own flat, and besides, he hasn’t been able to use Apparition for months. He should kick Stefanos out, then — or, failing that, at least go out himself and take a breath of fresh air. 

When he looks up, Stefanos’ face seems naked and defenceless. He takes a deep breath, as if he were preparing to go underwater. 

“You know there are Mind Healers, right?” he says with a frown. “There is no shame in seeing one. I have been doing so for almost two years now.”

“I don’t need another one of those sessions, thank you!”

“They don’t use Legillimency typically,” Stefanos says. “I only did so now because you asked me and it was the best way to see what the problem with your magic is. I’d have thought that you sorted it out in the years since Hogwarts, but obviously not…”

Dania cringes with humiliation and embarrassment. 

Just the other day when he saw Stefanos again in the park, Dania saw him watching a group of young women with a wistful expression on his face, as the girls clattered down the pathway, talking in loud, theatrical voices. “They have no idea how beautiful they are,” Stefanos said. Oh, they know, Dania thought. The world only reminds them every day. “They probably think their ears are too big or their breasts are too small,” Stefanos continued. “That’s how I felt when I was their age. Like I could never measure up.”

“Me, too.” Dania decided not to mention that the feeling had never gone away.

“If this is about the Battle—” Stefanos starts, but Dania cannot – he will not – have this conversation. Not now, and probably not ever.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he cuts him off and pointedly walks to the door. Stefanos is looking at him with something like regret and disappointment on his face, which is infinitely worse. Dania looks at the floor and tries not to blink. “I have to… I have things to do, so you should probably go.”

There is another long beat of silence, in which Dania hears Stefanos take a deep heavy breath.

“Alright,” he says and steps through the door. “I hope you’ll change your mind,” he adds before turning on his heel and disapparating away.

Dania looks at the spot where Stefanos just stood for a long time after he’s gone.

+++

In the morning, before even opening his eyes, Andrey can hear music and voices from the other end of the village, the sound of young people having fun.

It strikes him almost like a taunt, a reminder of everything he is missing, not just today but every day, the void that has become his life. He feels a minor panic attack coming on — or maybe just an urgent need for fresh air and human contact — and wonders what would happen if he marched there with Sascha held tight like a hostage and demanded they had fun, too.

Enough, he thinks and gets up, full of steely determination.

He yanks the blanket with such force that Sascha-the-dog tumbles to the floor, whining pathetically.

“Come on,” Andrey tells him in a hard voice. “Get up. Get up, get up, get up.”

Sascha stands, turning his mutt towards him, and stares at him with wide eyes, his flappy ears twitching this or that way every other second.

“Now turn back,” Andrey says — or rather, commands him, folding his arms against his chest. “I’ve had enough of this. Turn back now.”

When nothing happens and the dog just continues to stare at him with his tail between his legs, Andrey grits his teeth and storms downstairs. He can’t fucking look at Sascha in this form anymore.

He is weak and tired. Something bigger than the world hangs over his head, waiting to descend and crush him, and every morning he wakes with the smell of decay in his nostrils.

He feels like an observer in his own life, like if he wasn’t there, it would continue on just the same without him, like it’s been dragging out slowly and torturously for the last few years. He’s spent most of them terrified out of his mind, nauseous from the paradigm shift the world has taken, or reeling on the edge of a yawning chasm of grief.

As he spells the kettle, the weakness fades to tolerable levels, leaving Andrey feeling as though someone bigger and stronger were standing too close behind him. The hair on the back of his neck rises and he takes a moment to wait for the emotional disturbance to pass.

Then he hears footsteps. Not paws — but actual human footsteps.

“Thank you,” he mutters, as Sascha rounds the kitchen corner and hovers there beside him, as if unsure of what is expected of him now. Andrey straightens out and turns to him. “You’re coming to work with me today.”

Predictably, Sascha winces. “Why the hell would I go? No way—”

“You are coming,” Andrey tells him in the same commanding tone. Just as upstairs in the bedroom, he is convinced it would somehow work — Sascha inexplicably giving way to his newfound authority.

He is right. Sascha shuts up, though the expression on his face is far from happy. In fact, there’s a scared glint in his eye, easily recognisable as it’s been there for years — every time Sascha is required to make contact with the human world outside of Andrey’s flat.

“It’s gonna be alright,” Andrey sighs, taking pity on him, even though he is one raw exposed nerve himself. “Here, have some tea.”

While Sascha is busy covering his face up with his tea mug, Andrey contemplates the upcoming day. He knows George won’t mind Sascha being there, and it’ll be good for the both of them to have someone to talk to other than Andrey for a chance. Before Stefanos came for a visit the other week, Sascha hadn’t talked to another human being in months, which is bordering on psychotic.

“Will be nice to not have to spell your dog hair away for a day,” he snorts, looking at the sofa covered in white-yellow fur of Sascha’s canine form.

“It’s springtime. I’m shedding,” Sascha mutters into his cup. “You prefer spelling away my human hair instead?”

“I’d prefer an absence of any hair,” Andrey snorts. “Also, there’re many anti-balding potions, as I’m sure you know.”

“Yeah, right, that shit is all me, and definitely not you being a lazy fuck who just couldn't find any real reason to clean.” Sascha drawls, gaze sweeping around the sitting room.

“Like you know how to keep a fucking home.” Andrey says, lips pursed and wand clutched in his fist like a Muggle police baton. “Yeah, Domi’s flat was alright — no thanks to you — and I suppose the Tottenham Court Road House wasn’t your fault, but then there was that shithole in Liverpool you were renting, never mind wherever the fuck you'd been living after the Battle, probably some bloody hole in the ground lined with moss and mould — yeah, you really had your living situation all figured out. That place behind the bar was some real torture dungeon, you know that?”

Sascha raises one eyebrow. “Well, I did want to be in Slytherin.”

“Fuck you, Sasch. Go get a real house and let me know when you have to clean your own bloody dog hair,” Andrey grouses out, suddenly angry for no particular reason.

The air seems to shift a little like a wave of magic rolling over, Sascha going still and quiet, the temperature seemingly coming down around them as if they were attacked by Dementors, and he has the sudden realisation that he might've gone and said the wrong thing.

“You asking me to leave?” Sascha says, arms hanging down limp, his tea mug still held loosely in his fingers.

Andrey freezes, the question shocking him in its utter absurdity and pulling any response he could have thought of right out of his mouth. Of course, Sascha would go and take things the wrong way. Andrey swallows nervously, “Uh, no, no, of course not—”

“If you don't want me here, I can go.” Sascha cuts in quick, looking everywhere but at Andrey. “Been thinking about it anyway, should get up and get going, no need to keep bothering you, and it’s not like I have no money to afford my own place,” he says hastily, like he's been rehearsing the words over and over in his head for some time now and had the whole goddamn spiel just waiting in the wings for the moment that he could expel it.

The thought of Sascha leaving him alone in this house scares him more than it has any right or reason to.

“Merlin, calm down, will you?” Andrey says just as hastily. “You’re not bothering me.”

Sascha keeps looking at him as if expecting the other shoe to drop. Andrey sighs and gets back to the original topic.

“You alright to Apparate?”

Sascha frowns at his feet. “Better do side-along, I reckon.”

So he doesn’t trust himself with more complicated magic than Silencing charms, then. Andrey sighs again and grabs his wand. Then he steps close — inhales the smell of dog that never quite leaves Sascha these days — and grips his arm tightly. Sascha shivers slightly under his touch.

He Apparates the both of them to Diagon Alley. Sascha nearly topples over when they land, obviously too unused to the feeling. Andrey gives him a moment.

“Well,” George says upon seeing the two of them, his eyebrows raised slightly. “If it isn’t the Boy and His Dog.”

“Shut up,” Sascha says mildly, looking around the shop, “or I’ll come back and pee in the corner.”

“Nothing I haven’t done myself after too many a bottle of Firewhiskey,” George snorts. He spares them another moment of attention and then gets back to his work, which includes some sort of purplish-lavender potion bubbling in the cauldron.

“Sascha really hoped his Animagus form would be something a lot cooler,” Andrey teases. “Like a dragon or, at least, a lion. Instead, he gets to chase Pygmy Puffs and lick his balls.”

“Do lions not lick their balls?” George wonders offhandedly.

“Lion-form is for brave people,” Andrey says pointedly. “Brave enough to act like a decent human being for a day.”

“But Muuuum,” Sascha whines exaggeratedly at Andrey, “you know what a strain acting like a decent human being puts on me!”

“You’ll live,” Andrey snorts, putting on his uniform. “Might do you well talking to some actual customers.”

“Most customers this time of year are snotty children under Hogwarts age,” Sascha grumbles and hops up onto the counter.

“So exactly the same as your mental age, then” Andrey says. George snorts by the cashier.

They set up the store, Sascha doing fuckall while Andrey and George busy themselves with inventory. From time to time, Andrey hears Sascha short or chuckle while examining the various items on the display shelves.

It’s almost noon by the time the first customers start pooling in — mostly kids and their exasperated parents, obviously dragged into the store against their will or having relented to endless whining of their offspring — and finally, Andrey is in his element. Here he gets to smile and joke around and just… talk to people. People who aren’t traumatised, moody Animagus switching back to their animal form at the first sign of trouble, piling their own pain on top of Andrey’s.

He feels guilty as soon as he thinks that. It’s not like Sascha doesn’t have to deal with Andrey’s own coping every night. Still, it feels nice to be out and about, even if it’s only the job he gets paid to do.

So busy is he entertaining a group of kids with a particularly active Pygmy Puff (Sascha is especially mesmerised by those in his canine form), that he doesn’t notice Harry Potter himself walking in. Only when the kids he’s talking to all turn to gape with identical starstruck expressions on their faces, does Andrey see the Wizarding World Saviour clapping George on the shoulder.

“How’s the Ministry treating you?” George asks him, as Andrey comes closer.

Harry winces. “I swear, the bureaucracy is gonna be the end of me.”

“Would be rather ironic,” Sascha comments from where he is huddled in the corner. “Surviving Voldemort and the wizarding war, only to fall victim to a bunch of papers.”

“Don’t tell Ginny, but I reckon I’d rather face another Voldemort than Meredith from the accounting,” Harry says with a miserable face. “I should have gone to professional Quidditch like you guys.”

“And look how that turned out for us,” Sascha says with a vague hand gesture.

Harry frowns. “But you’re going back to it, right? You’re not gonna be hanging about the shop forever?”

Sascha’s face darkens and he doesn’t respond. “Sascha’s ban is still on for the next year,” Andrey says, watching him carefully.

“Ah,” Harry says, looking slightly awkward. “I remember being banned in my fifth year, it was bloody horrible. You guys are lucky you’d graduated by the time Umbridge got to Hogwarts.”

“She’s still in the Ministry,” Sascha says darkly. “Believe it or not, the bitch didn’t even get fired. Saw her on the fourth floor when I was still working there.”

“What were you doing in the ministry?”

“George’s dad got me a job in the Muggle Liaison department,” Sascha says listlessly.

“Which he promptly quit after only a few weeks,” Andrey snipes.

“Harry,” Sascha says haltingly, as if he didn’t hear Andrey at all. “Can I talk to you? Privately.”

Harry looks surprised, but nods nevertheless. “Um, sure. You wanna go outside?”

“We can go to the back room,” Sascha says and walks to the back of the shop, Harry following him uncertainly. Andrey stares after them in utter confusion. What the hell would Sascha talk to Harry Potter about?

“You’re seething, mate,” George says quietly, looking at him shrewdly. “You can have a Calming Drop if you want.”

Andrey forces himself to breathe evenly. He can’t believe that even now, after they’ve lived together for months and months, after everything they went through together, Sascha would rather talk to a virtual stranger than Andrey. That Sascha is still keeping secrets from him.

“I’m fine,” he snaps at George, who just shrugs and goes back to his potion.

When they emerge from the back room, Sascha looks hopeful and almost… happy for the first time in what feels like decades.

Andrey hates that it had to be Harry Potter who managed to put that expression on his face.

+++

It’s impossible to count how many times Dania thinks of Stefanos with a kind of bitter tenderness — almost each of his thoughts is like that. Dania deliberately catches every last one of them and dumps it in the boiling lava of his aggression — red and thick like blood, and putrid like rotten meat infested with maggots. It seems to him that this is the only way he can stay intact and not fall victim to Stefanos’ charm. The only way to keep himself invulnerable.

Still, it takes a Herculean effort to consciously keep doing it. Dania is so busy coming up with the ways Stefanos is the absolute worst, that he entirely forgets about the Snitch during his next match. He doesn’t catch a glimpse of it even once in all the forty minutes it takes for his team to lose. Oliver Wood isn’t very happy with Dania by the end of it, even going as far as to suggest Dania take a break.

“I’m fine,” Dania argues. The thought of a break — an indefinite amount of time without flying — terrifies him.

“We’ll see how fine you are against the Holyhead Harpies,” Oliver says firmly, shaking his head. “If it’s anything like your performance today, you’re taking a break. At this point you’re doing more harm than good.”

Dania heads home in the foulest of moods. Quidditch is all he has left, his only real link to normal wizarding life. Without it, he would become one of those lost souls you see all over Diagon Alley and in Leaky Cauldron since the Battle — pale, dead-eyed blokes who sleep all day and drift from the pub to the Ministry to Hogsmeade at night, habitually waiting for an owl with a letter that never seems to come.

Without Quidditch, there’d be nothing separating him from Muggles.

His magic is gone or, even if it’s still there — he has no way of getting to it. Occlumency is failing him now that Stefanos is back in his life again, or maybe he hadn’t mastered it like he thought he had. Either way, Dania has got to do something, has got to fight for his life and his own bloody happiness or he risks turning into another ghost.

He is already living like a Muggle, going to practice on foot, heating his food in a Muggle microwave. If Dania lets this fester any further, he’s going to forget what magic — besides Stefanos’ — even feels like.

It’s funny how as a child, Dania believed that magic would forever solve all his problems. It was magic. Surely, it could right all wrongs and create something brilliant out of nothing. It was a miracle.

He’d never think, back then, bright-eyed and naïve, that magic would become as trivial as brushing his teeth. As commonplace as washing his hands. As useless as elaborate fantasies about a brighter future.

Only now that he can’t cast even a simple Lumos, does he remember being small and wishing for a wand with an unbearable longing.

These days, he might as well leave his wand at home for all the use it does him.

So he swallows his pride, takes a quill and gets to writing another letter. He counts on Stefanos to still be a kind, forgiving soul who’ll let Dania off the hook for his rudeness and help him.

A bit sheepishly, he writes to Stefanos that despite what is being said about him in the Daily Prophet, his place on the Quidditch team still isn’t secure. Some of the guys — ex-Aurors, wizards who’d been tested by fire — suspect Dania of being a useless boy who’d crumble under pressure, and, even though Dania kind of dreads that he is, he’s still determined to prove them wrong, to show that he belongs.

Stefanos writes back almost immediately. His letter says — predictably — that he would be glad to help, bless him. He’d meet Dania again and be willing to try some more Legillimency to solve the issue, though he won’t be available for the next three days.

He’s signed the letter with ‘kind regards, Stefanos Tsitsipas.’ Dania frowns down at it for a long time, at the impersonal, distant politeness of it, and uselessly wishes things were different.

+++