Post by FRED WEASLEY on Oct 21, 2012 0:20:31 GMT -5
ooc: so i put this in the time turner because I think it'd be considered a future thread, and knowing us, it's probably going to end up AU to the better idea we get half way through some other thread or.. yeah, ya know. anyway, if you're not tilly and i- you should know that stalking our threads is pointless by now. you've been warned.
What? Fine, we can be more traditional.
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. At least, that's what you say when you're talking to someone else who's been handed the unfortunate lemons of life. When you end up with two arms full of them, you understand exactly why that statement should be high ranked on the list of biggest-bullshit-ever-written. See, life supplies the lemons. But it doesn't give you a knife to cut them open with. Or a glass to put them in. Or the sugar or water required to make drinking it tolerable (because otherwise it would only be lemon juice. but even that needs the knife and the glass). So really, when life gives you lemons, making lemonade isn't a very probable solution. Of course...you could probably transfigure your lemons into lemonade. But.. you could also make them a monkey. (Or make a monkey lemonade) So that's just.. let's not even go there.
For sanity's sake, it was good to finally get out of the castle (if you couldn't tell by the paragraph of lemon ranting). It was like being able to breathe for the first time after being trapped underground. And now you were out but there was still one thing you needed to do. Disappear; get lost; blend into a crowd of faces who don't know you; don't care about you; who won't give you that look or ask those questions or pretend- because c'mon now, nobody is going to be winning any acting awards any time soon. He doesn't get why they think he'd know any more than they do, but he does, because he'd have thought he would too (-insert accusatory glances to a anticancer pair of Weasley twins here-). And he hadn't been able to apologize to McGonagall yet, because the entire reason she and Hagrid got hurt was because of him, and he knows that she probably knows already, because nobody else could be so bloody, fucking, stupid (its a gift). Because the effect couldn't have been more opposite than his intentions if he tried... But where did trying get anyone anyway?
One. Two. Th- Two. One. Two. Two twins gone. Two girls pissed. Two teachers injured. Stupid numbers were just taking over everything. He couldn't go back, not really. If there was ever a time to leave.. He was already gone. Of course, (one of the many)the only problem with that plan was that Hogsmeade was.. well, he didn't even know where it was, which meant it could have been like a country away from where he lived. But that didn't really seem like anything that mattered. The funny thing about aimless wandering was that you never really were aimless. Unless you aimlessly winded up at Zonkos every single time you went to Hogsmeade (possible, who knows?). Well- if you're there already- why not just- why not...(When life gives you lemons by novelty prank items to go with them.) Almost immediately after entering the store however he noticed someone he (under normal circumstances) would have been a lot happier to see. (He was kind of happy to see him now as well. He just.. wasn't. At the same time.) He turned away and grabbed the first thing he could get his hands on off the shelf. Watch (one), count (two), walk away, find the first thing outside and pretend to take interest (one. two... it was only easy to get distracted when you weren't trying). Yeah. Well... Well, he hadn't even wanted to go to the joke shop anyway.
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No more Umbridge. WWW. It was worth it. Fred would keep repeating that to himself until stuff started turning out epic. He was sort of still waiting on that part. He knew that starting a business would be work, but he never imagined it’d be anything like what it actually was turning out to be. It had been weeks of preparation and they had a large, empty building to show for it. Filling the shelves with products was going to be the fun part, but it couldn’t be done until the paperwork was done. At the rate things were going, that was going to take a while.
He needed a break. There really wasn’t much to do being out of school. George was out searching for supplies they’d need for the shop and Fred had no idea where to find him. There were only a few other people Fred was willing to deal with in his current mood, and he had left them at school quite a while ago. That left him with the option of talking to himself while wandering and looking for inspiration for products. He had no choice but to go to Zonko’s. Entering the joke shop was slightly helpful on the whole bad mood thing, but it had nowhere near the affect that seeing Lee Jordan did.
He didn’t even know whether he should be excited or freaked out. It had been far too long since Fred had last seen his best friend, and he hadn’t exactly left him in good regards. He watched Lee walk through the shop’s entrance and quickly turned away to collect his thoughts. You know you wanna talk to him..but he’s probably peeved. Awkwardness wasn’t their specialty, so hopefully this would go semi-well. When he turned around, he had noticed that his friend had turned away as well, and had even gone so far as to exit. This was not going to be fun.
Following Lee out, Fred eagerly greeted him, having no choice but to be glad to see him even under such circumstances. Leaving that quickly, Jordan?
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Lee wasn't good at this. This whole.. he didn't even know what this was. This, this (we know how helpful word repetition is in getting ideas)... negative thing. Dwelling, worrying, keeping things to himself. God, he sucked at keeping things to himself. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk to Fred, he just- he wanted to not want to.. which, made a lot more sense when it wasn't put into words. There was a large, dominant part of him that was completely okay with pretending this never happened just so it could get back to normal. But.. for what? An hour or so? Fred didn't deserve it. Hedidn't even deserve it. This... just, goawaygoawaygoaway. Yeah. Sure.
The plan, was the stand outside, figure out what the hell he wanted to do, and do it. But.. he knew what he wanted to do.. and he wasn't to eager to go and- you know, I don't even need to talk about that. Because you know its irrelevant. Things went as planned for them like guessing the roll on Candyland (can't play that game by yourself, ya know). It would have been too easy for Fred to have missed him. A few seconds in passing, he was busy, couldn't have- of course he did. And then there wasn't any more choice. Lee looked at him, tried to judge.. something, but it didn't last. Hands in his hair, eyes off because he really was good at pretending he had a purpose... waaaay over that-a-way. very interesting, that bit of sidewalk.
Excuses. He could think of enough of them. He just didn't have any at the moment and he knew Fred knew that. He looked at the twin again. Couldn't... could-not tell him off like he wanted to- like he should have. Couldn't. Sucks, things like that.
Yeah, I've got to go back. You know. Unlike some people.
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The hands in the hair were never a good sign coming from Lee, but Fred could work with that. Sarcasm. It was better than nothing. In fact, it was a lot better than nothing. When it came to Lee, silence was the absolute worst sign. Even in the crappiest of situations (they would know), Lee usually managed to talk about something—usually meaning like 99.9% of the time. Therefore, Fred was more than happy to hear Lee’s snarky remark. There was also the fact that Fred was pretty sure it was killing Lee inside that he had said it..that he had said anything. Yea, Fred was going to have to fix that. He screwed up, big deal. He didn’t think through his actions. Lee knew that already, probably better than anyone. He’d get over it.
So, Fred knew that the goal was to keep Lee talking (which he didn’t plan on being a difficult task once he got him started). The question was—how was he going to do it? He needed to talk to Lee, but he really didn’t know what to say. It had been a while and Fred was really happy to see him. So.. was he going to go all sarcastic and get all up in Lee’s dreads or was he going to lay off a little? He decided to go wth a happy mixture of the two approaches. He’d be sarcastic, but not in an ‘I’m annoyed with you’ kind of way. Yea, your professors will want you back. Since when has that been a good enough reason for you to go back? The twin was fairly certain that he could get Lee to stay for a while. Besides, it was unlikely that he was even really on his way back anyway. That was most likely the poor excuse he’d come up with in the little time that he had.
The Weasley’s hand went to the back of his neck as he thought of a response. How is it..? Okay, that sucked. But, what else could he say? He did genuinely care what was going on at the school and how people (Lee in particular) were doing. You wanna go get a coffee or something? What’re you doing here? Once the words started coming, it was really hard to hold them back. He was best-friend-deprived. Mate, You’re not going back yet. I don’t really care what you want to do. With Lee, he was up for anything.
Ooc: remember when I said my next post would be more.. me? I hope this is okay. It’s still not great, but again, I think it’s the situation that’s killing both of us. So we both just need to suck it up and be okay with our posts because we generally approve of each other’s xD We also sort of need to figure out what they're gonna do xD
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Of course. It shouldn't have been a surprise that Fred was going to catch on, figure out a hell of a lot more than Lee wanted him too, and start asking all thewrong, erright questions. Lee didn't really know what he was expecting with the whole 'snarky comment' thing (he hadn't thought it through that far) but Fred was doing a really good job at making this situation more difficult than it already was (which said something). So, we all know blaming him was just another excuse, but since those were working out so well.. what was one more?
Since... when.. Since.. Since now. On a scale of one to ten, that was like a.. 2, on the effective radar. No shit. Okay. Lee wasn't going back right now. Stupid best-friend-mind-reading-what-ever-you-wanted-to-call-it-with-its-ups-and-downs-from-knowing-each-other-too-damn-well. He could have answered with a book to Fred's next question. Okay, he could probably answer with a book to almost any question. But this one, definite rant potential. Too much rant potential. How's what? School?... You don't wanna know First, yeah, that bad. Secondly, he was just under the impression Fred really couldn't have cared. Hows the shop? He hated to say, but he wanted to know.
Okay, so they were talking. Just hangin' out, you know.. Coffee sounds good..If you want.., and now they were going to go do something. The only thing that separated this from any other day was the awkward sort of awkwardness (you love my wording, dont you dare deny) and the fact that there were a large number of days between the last day they did something like this and this one.
ooc: i wrote most of this on my phone, in a restaurant, where cray people kept staring at me, and my sister threw a temper tanturm, and we got kicked out.. while i was posting.. just thought you might wanna know xD do i think its good. hells nope. no obnoxious dialogue. le gasp. tryin' to work with the color too.. cause i want it.. but its dark.. okay, ooc should not be as long as paragraph. bai xD
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The talking was actually working. They were getting somewhere.. even though it was obvious that Lee was still pissed off. Since now. Yeaaa, Fred saw that one coming. He had sort of set himself up for it. Lee’s next comment made Fred curious, but he wasn’t sure if it was worth asking questions about it. He couldn’t imagine that the school got better in the time that he was gone. If things were going to get better, the twins could have stayed. They just hadn’t really thought about how much worse they were making things for some people by getting out. Therefore, hearing about how the school was didn’t sound very appealing. Bad, huh? Well, that sucked as far as pep talks went. Yanno that thing people do when they avoid the subject which makes communication difficult? Yea, it was time to get that part over with. It was dumb—what we did. We weren’t thinking very much when we did it. I didn’t want to bring a bunch of shit to you. There goes that.
Confession time. The shop? It’s..a work in progress. Seriously, that business stuff was insane, all the work that went into planning and renting an area and taking care of property and all that. When you want to start a business, it’s hard to think of anything other than ‘oh my gosh we’re gonna be so rich and sell awesome sauce stuff’. It took time to prepare and it took patience to wait all that time and patience was not something that came easily to Fred. It didn’t come easily to Lee either, which was probably why Lee was going to react the way Fred was pretty sure he was going to react; something along the lines of what the hell? You ditch and stay away for this long and have..what..to show for it? It’s a horribly tedious process, he mumbled, clearly tired of waiting. He probably wouldn’t have to wait as long if he would sit around and do all the work required to open instead of mindlessly walking around Diagon, but he had George to follow that track of common sense.
They were going to hang out. Finally. It was about time. It didn’t take long to figure out that living without Lee Jordan after being accustomed to living with Lee Jordan was like being locked in a room with no noise for like months. Sounds like a plan. Anything’s cool, really. I don’t care. You don’t have to go back, do ya? Doubt you’re learning anything there with Umbridge going all psychopath.. Have you gotten back at ‘er? There was so much they hadn’t talked about that needed to be said. They always knew what was going on in the other’s mind, so this was foreign territory. They both had too much information that the other went without knowing..which complicated their mind-reading ability.
Fred was dying to know what was going on in Lee’s head and the questions weren’t being asked or answered fast enough. He had to let Lee know what page he was on before he could expect to get anywhere. Jordan, I’m pretty sorry. Like, I realize that was idiotic. Pushing an old lady in front of a bus idiotic. It was awful. We really needed you and we couldn’t go back. It sucked. We got out, and we were happy for about five minutes. Then we realized what we had done to everyone else. I really don’t give a damn about everyone else, honestly, but I really did give a damn about what you were up to. Enlighten me. What were you up to? There was no way in hell Lee Jordan sat around quietly in a corner without wreaking some sort of havoc. It just sort of would have been better for Fred to know what kind of consequences came with that before opening his curious mouth.
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Bad? No, of course not. It was like skipping through a meadow. And it was even better because only Fred would understand what that meant. Hogwarts had been a mess before the twins flew the coop and that kind of thing definitely wasn’t on the list of what made Umbridge decide to hand out cookies and wave detentions (not that anyone would trust either of those things coming from her in any circumstance..) Lucky for Lee, he didn’t have to actually answer that totally unnecessary question. You, not thinking? No way. he teased. Wasn’t quite sure what to make of the seriousness of it all. Foreign, very foreign stuff going on there. Hey, it’s no big deal.
Small. Minuscule. Really and completely insignificant. Sort of. Like I said, as much as he didn’t want it to be true, Lee had figured the twins would have had lots of exciting stuff going on for them now, starting with a totally-finished already-opened joke shop. But apparently he was wrong. He was kind of happy (ya know, that he didn’t miss any and everything awesome), but also, like… really? He knew that there was a lot of technical stuff that went into this (yeah, like, he actually knew that) but still. Mate its been like months. Seriously, what have you been doing?
Fred and… questions. Of course, Lee had questions too, plenty of them, but, it was getting hard to sort through all this stuff- the way the questions were going. Did he have to go back? I’m not going back. Like, that was totally obvious. Yeah, he’d finalized that decision in the last few seconds. I mean, that was how Fred and George had done it and it all worked out fine(ish) there. I just don’t know what I am doing yet, Cause ya know, he couldn’t exactly just go home in the middle of the day in the middle of the year and say school got canceled because there was a rare flesh eating virus in the pumpkin juice or some random holiday every ten years (actually, that was a pretty good excuse). He imagined most of the Weasleys weren’t exactly happy with what the twins did, but at least they understood what was going on with Umbridge and why no right minded human being would want to spend a day more at Hogwarts than was absolutely necessary. So if he was out there, he was out there. And apparently he’d just made the descision to get out there. Awesome. (All Fred’s fault.)
And as for the oother question, Whether or not he’d gotten back at Toad-Face depended completely on one’s definition of ‘getting back’. Lee had considered most of what everyone did all year acting our, or being defiant -int he words of the Toad-, including the twin’s great escape. But nobody had every really attacked her, ya know? Boom. Boom. Crash. Sound effects completely necessary. Yeah...I did. And then she got back worse. They could just.. drop it there, right? He wasn’t going to lie to Fred. Had Fred been there, he’d have known everything already. Of course, had Fred been there, there was a good chance things would have ended up very differently. Lets- c’mon, let’s go. He didn’t even remember where they’d decided on going, but the awkwardness was coming back (it wasn't that he didn't want to tell him, he just -couldnt- tell him) and he didn't know how to fix it.
Fred did. Fred’s who ‘hey, this was impulsive’ was sort of expected, but Lee definitely didn’t think he’d be hearing him apologize and say.. well, half the things he just said. I think all the alone time with George has made you more sentimental. Mate, you don’t even know how many people were so impressed- I don’t even think you know how cool it was. And it was cool. It was all people talked about for the longest time. It was- seriously- you’d have loved it.. I, was at school, ya know? It's not that exciting a place when we're not running around. I dunno what they're gonna do next year. Or, now, I guess. I’m sure whatever you’ve been doing’s a lot more worth talking about.
He'd definitely missed hanging out with his friend. And things were becoming slightly more normal. Like, he got Fred, again. He knew what he was thinking. He owed Fred that too. I didn't do a whole lot. I mean- that not, okay I- Look, like, if what you did was pushing an old lady in front of a bus stupid it was like.. I-don’t-even-have-a-comparison worse. I told you I tried to get back at Toad-Face. I let Nifflers loose in her office. They tore the place apart and bit her and everything.It was, awesome, I mean, at the time- even if I got caught- whatever. It was all just- until later when she decided to say that what happened was that they "got loose" and blame Hagrid for that- even though that’s not possible, because I got them in through the window and she knewthat and I knew she knew for sure. So later that night there’s Ministry everywhere. And there's a fight. And now Hagrid's gone and McGonagall’s in St. Mungos and everyone's in more trouble and if you thought Toad-Face was doing whatever she wanted before- (Congradulations because your pressuring my to post this you don't get an ending because I don't have an ending because I don't even know what the hell this post was about and it's all your fault mkay bye)
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The fact that Lee teased him was assurance that his mood was improving, which was perfect. I know it’s hard to believe, but sometimes that happens. They didn’t exactly have all the time in the world to plan the escape, so they were doing it under a lot of pressure. If it had not been successful, they’d have been in a shitload of trouble. It had to work, and that was all there was to it. The fact that George, too, had carried it out without a lot of thinking spoke for itself. It still seemed like it was a pretty big deal, but Fred let it go at that (until his mini-rant). Of course, if would have been a smaller deal if the twins had this amazing place to give Lee a tour around.. but alas, they had nothing of the sort.
Months clearly had not been long enough. What’ve we been doing? Everything it apparently requires to open a shop. We sit down and we fill out paperwork and then we set it aside to do more and then we lose what we set aside and then we forget how to read because of all the damn staring at paper and it’s bloody tedious. It’d be worth it eventually. Either that, or Fred and George would somehow illegally inherit Zonko’s. Evidently, genius joke shops don’t happen over night. Could’ve fooled me. Everything had to be filled out, down to the color of the walls and the type of finishing on the shelves. Half of the stuff wasn’t even details that Fred would have put into consideration. He knew that he wanted to sell stuff that pissed people off and made people happy at the same time—none of this nitty-gritty crap.
Brilliant. Let’s figure out what you’re doing, then. It was obvious immediately that Fred had asked a question Lee didn’t feel like talking about. Umbridge getting back worse has to be absolutely horrible. He refrained from asking how much worse she actually got him because he knew that if Lee needed to share later, he would. Nothing was going to hold him back if he legitimately wanted to explain. Fred figured it just wasn’t a very pleasant story to tell, and he couldn’t help but wonder how the story would have ended differently if he had been there. He started walking with Lee when he said let’s go, not entirely sure where they were going. Coffee seemed to be the only idea they had at the moment, so that was the direction Fred was heading.
When Fred and George had decided to make a scene, they had hoped that it’d be big news within the school, but hearing it from Lee was the best thing ever. It proved that they had achieved their goal in doing it. The problem was, the part where they embarrassed Umbridge didn’t last long enough, and she got pissed off about it. At first, Fred was completely impressed with what Lee had decided to do (okay, admittedly, he was still impressed after hearing the downfall of that plan). But, now he realized why Lee seemed to have a hard time talking about it. It had pretty much backfired, which was not what Lee had deserved at all. If anything, Fred was angry with Umbridge for escalating the problem the way she did. She’d do that—of course she did. But, listen, Hagrid and McGonagall will be back. Dumbledore just needs to take care of Toad-face. It’s not your fault, she’s taken over. Wish I could’ve seen her face with the Nifflers.. He knew the situation had to suck for Lee, but the least he could do was try to shine some light on it a little.