February 14th, 1891 - The Augurey Beak Cafe

He'd been doing an art project from his perch at the side of the bar during the meeting, which let out early, because presumably some people had better things to do than talk about injustice all afternoon. Not Kieran, who was feeling decidedly un-romanced, and was dealing with it with the project in question.

Roses were scattered across the table, he'd come with a bundle of them; Kieran spent the meeting cutting the flowers from the stems and threading them together on a gold-colored string, swearing anytime a thorn on one of the stems caught his hand. He kept having to reach over the flowers to get to his drink, and things were sort of messy. (He was, probably, lucky that the Augurey staff were as tolerant of him as they were.)

Eventually, he ran out of flowers, and tied off the string at the end. Now he had - an awkward loop of roses. What was the point of this, again?

Their friends were starting to file out of the cafe. Kieran stood up, finished his beer in two quick gulps, and waved to stop Jude from leaving with them.

"Here," Kieran said; he thrust out the chain of roses with one hand. "Put this on."

---

There was a great deal more he had wanted to talk about on women’s wages, never mind their property rights - but there wasn’t much use on a day like this, when people had places to be and things to do and even Kingsley had a shift to hurry off to. No sense in sitting here going over it alone.

So he had made it halfway to the door when Kieran sought his attention with a wave, which turned him around in his tracks. His eyebrows shot upwards at the arrangement of roses, all painstakingly threaded together in a loop. He hadn’t asked what Kieran was doing - Kieran did all sorts of strange things during their meetings, he was used to it - but the flower project was a rarer sight than the sketching.

Jude took the roses from him, almost without thinking - but he did not put them on, just stared blankly. “Um, why?” he managed eventually, aware that Kieran had been working hard on them but truly quite disconcerted by the meaning of this, if there was any at all. “What will they do?”

Quite suddenly, he remembered the roses from that May Day.

---

He'd almost hoped that Jude would just put them on without asking, but no such luck.

"Dangle around your neck in a way that's aesthetically pleasing," Kieran said in a monotone, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. He knew he was being weird, but Kieran did all sorts of odd things without acknowledging that they were odd, and usually it worked out fine for him. He grinned and added: "It's St. Valentine's Day, you should humor me."

Jude was always humoring him, or helping him, or tolerating him. This was a silly thing to press his luck on and Kieran knew it, but he had a flower chain and who else was he going to put it on? Anyone else would be a waste.

---

Don’t I always? Jude thought, because if this had been anyone else they would have been pushing their luck here. Kieran, however, had made such a habit of pushing his luck that this was not nearly outrageous enough to justify picking a fight over. Or at least that was what Jude told himself, relaxing his shoulders in a silent sigh.

“I didn’t think you would be celebrating St. Valentine’s,” he put in, a little aware that his mouth had gone dry at the thought that Kieran had something to grin about. On what was an objectively stupid holiday.

Jude turned the garland of roses around in his hands, pretending to be absorbed in admiring the artistry, but mostly bemused by the fact Kieran was still here talking to him - and wishing, too, that he had just put them on without making a thing about it, if ‘it’ was a meaningless gesture because Kieran was especially bored.

At any rate, Jude supposed, if he was going to look absolutely stupid in a public place at least it was only the Augurey. “I’ll put them on if you promise me they’re not - charmed,” he surrendered, eyeing Kieran with a last vestige of suspicion.

---

"I can celebrate St. Valentine's day and May Day, I contain multitudes," Kieran said flippantly, watching Jude play with the garland. There was something about Jude and the color red that had always been appealing, and it was only because he did actually want Jude to wear the garland that he added: "It's not charmed, I swear. Please?"

For added affect, Kieran looked up at Jude through his eyelashes, with a slight pout. He didn't think there were high odds of Jude turning him down, but he couldn't resist - and maybe it was a little overdramatic of him, sure, but it was St. Valentine's day and he couldn't think of any other uses for the silly garland he had strung together.

---

Jude couldn’t say why it was far easier to trust Kieran with his life than it was when it came to tiny inconsequential things, but apparently he held onto his qualms a little longer in situations like the latter. Until Kieran pulled that face - ridiculous, plaintive, eyelash-batting as it was - and Jude couldn’t take it any more; he rolled his eyes, gave a long-suffering huff, and strung the rose garland around his neck.

He didn’t feel any different for it, at least, so it probably wasn’t charmed. Not that it mattered whether it was charmed or not, because - well, Kieran was Kieran, and he didn’t even have to be trying, and at this point, if there was something like a saturation point to it, Jude wasn’t sure he had space left in him for sentiment towards anyone else.

As casually as he could, he put out his hands, palms upward, to say happy? Though now he felt more at a loose end, unsure whether they were staying or going or if Kieran was just going to survey his good work and then strand him here. 

“I don’t have anything for you,” Jude remarked, half-apologetic, half-defensive.

---

Okay, there, that was right - the roses were dark compared to Jude's hair, such a saturated red, but they fit. Because both the roses and Jude himself were too bright, too much to be in here, in a sketchy bar with dreary decorations and dreary customers, with Kieran. Jude's long-suffering little noise and gestures didn't reduce the affect at all.

"You don't need to give me anything," Kieran said, easily, because Jude didn't — Jude already did far too much for him. But, before he could contain it, the next thought spilled out of his mouth: "I'd like to paint you."

He was always sketching Jude, here and at home; talking at meetings and making tea in the morning and standing so self-assured at events. But he certainly didn't tell him about it.

---

He’d known Kieran would say that, because he always did and it still wasn’t true, but they could go around in circles about that forever and there was nothing Jude could practically give him that would make a difference the way he wished it could.

The latter part of Kieran’s response, however, made him blink. Because he was wearing the roses? He had thought they were the art project, but maybe they were just a part of it? “Really?” Jude asked eventually, his eyebrows still raised in surprise but his tone fairly even in spite of it. He quirked a brief, disbelieving sort of smile. “You don’t have anything better to paint than me?”

He was the only one left here right now, sure, and maybe this was something Kieran had begged of everyone else already or needed specific practice at painting people or maybe he really was desperately bored and had run out of all ideas, Jude didn’t know: he did not know enough to fathom how an artist’s mind worked, any more than he could ever fathom Kieran’s.

He surveyed him with an uncharacteristic degree of hesitance, and didn’t say anything else, but he supposed - as evidenced by the roses and that he was not in the habit of denying Kieran’s requests unless there was good reason to - that his silence was not exactly a hard no, either.

---

There were several things Kieran wanted to say to that — that he sketched Jude all the time, that Jude reflected the light in any room he was in, that Jude had the features of an angel, or a saint, so anyone who saw him would of course want to paint him. Of course. Instead, Kieran reached to straighten the roses around Jude's neck, or perhaps just adjust them, and swallowed before he responded, lest he misspeak. In making the request at all he had of course misspoken.

"What could be better?" Kieran asked.

---

What could be better? Anything that meant something, anything that would make a difference, anything that might say something or move people or do whatever good art did. And even Kieran’s most throwaway sketches seemed too valuable to waste, catching things in motion and utterly true to life, a little piece of the world ensnared by his fingertips and pressed to the page. Jude didn’t understand it, but Kieran had already reached for the roses like he could see what he wanted of them, like he was working out a picture in his head.

“You don’t actually need me to answer that, do you?” Jude said with a wry smile, shaking his head and gesturing vaguely as though to demonstrate the range of possibilities even here - a lone stranger at a table in the corner, a few half-empty beers left on the bar, the streetlamp shine on front windows that probably hadn’t been washed in years, the dusty dead augurey beak on the wall; or alternatively there was the truth, that anything would be better, because at least then you wouldn’t be looking at me.

He couldn’t use that as a reason, that maybe he was wary of Kieran’s undivided scrutiny. And it had no real logic because they saw each other all the time, spoke all the time, Kieran had sat through a hundred meetings over the years and Jude hadn’t minded that, but somehow the thought of Kieran just looking, studying with a purpose and capturing what he saw was more daunting than all of it, as if - if Kieran looked hard enough - he might see through Jude completely.

But, Jude reminded himself, if Kieran hadn’t seen the truth yet, a painting was not going to change that; being painted was not going to matter. “But - alright,” he said instead, meeting Kieran’s eyes with more calmness than he felt. “If you want.”

---

Kieran grinned at Jude's answer in a flash of expression, and then tried to tone it down to a normal level; painting Jude was more intimate than sketching him in secret, more intimate than the full moon mornings they spent together. Kieran's pulse kicked up a notch. This could be his undoing, really, if Jude paid enough attention.

Except would it really be that bad if Jude knew? It was obvious enough to Kieran, surely it was obvious enough to other people — maybe if Jude knew, even not reciprocating, it wouldn't be that damaging. Kieran mulled the thought over, tucked it away — the point was not his being in love with Jude, the point was that he was going to paint Jude. Those were separate issues (although they could not be fully extracted from one another.)

"You'll have to come to my flat though," he said, "I don't have them with me." And there was another pang of nerves at that — was Kieran's flat a disaster at the moment? He wasn't even sure.

---

“Yes,” Jude said, with visible amusement, “I figured.” He had seen Kieran work on a lot of things in the middle of the Augurey, but charcoals or cutting up roses were not quite the same thing as painting. Jude wasn’t convinced he had ever actually seen Kieran in the midst of that, so - there would be something worthwhile to be gained from this, at least.

“Shall we go now?” he suggested, taking a step closer as a signal that Kieran may as well apparate them both there. Having done so, Jude clasped Kieran’s forearm lightly in expectation, not because he didn’t know how to get to Kieran’s flat for himself but because it felt like a better courtesy to wait for him to agree.

And maybe he hadn’t meant immediately - hopefully he had not been joking with his request - but Jude already had a blasted string of roses around his neck, didn’t he; and it was probably the best case scenario, getting it over with now rather than having a wealth of time to dwell on it, he mused. For his own sanity.

---

"Sure," Kieran said, still wracking his brain to try to remember the state the flat had been in this morning — hopefully it was only mildly messy, and didn't have random items of his clothing strewn about. (This was not due to any debauchery as much as it was due to Kieran being a bit of a mess.)

He grabbed his wand in his pocket and apparated them to the main room of the flat with a pop! Jude had been here before, but Kieran didn't think it had been for anything as lengthy as sitting for a painting — he was already regretting the impulse that had him asking. The flat wasn't too much of a mess; there was a bottle of whiskey on the coffee table (which was also the eating table, and there was half a loaf of bread there, too) that was mostly-finished and left open. Other than the assortment of empty bottles on the kitchen counter there wasn't much strewn about.

"Do you want tea or anything?" Kieran asked. He stepped away from Jude only so that he could walk over to the shoddy desk shoved in a corner of the room, and open the drawer to bring out a little wicker basket of oil paints. There was a blank canvass in the same drawer, rolled up, and he shoved it under his arm before he turned around. He'd committed now, it was too late to back out.

---

The flat was familiar enough, but Jude glanced around to survey it all the same, if only to see what had changed.

He shook his head at the question, because although his mouth was a little dry he hadn’t been thirsty a moment ago. “I’ll make you one while you set up,” he suggested nonetheless, heading for the kettle before Kieran could protest. It might have been mostly to give himself something mindless to do while Kieran was getting out the paints, to tamp down an uncharacteristic rush of nerves with something habitual, normal. He made tea all the time.

And if he had waited until the kettle was whistling to hide the clinking of empty bottles a little as he tidied them up, discreetly - he hoped Eileen had had her share in these - that was mostly mindless too. When Jude moved away from the counter at last and paced back over to Kieran with the tea, he focused his attention on the paints instead, looking at the little flecks of dried paint on some of the caps, picking out the most-used colours, trying to imagine what other things Kieran sat and painted in his spare time. “Where do you, er, want me to -?”

---

Kieran made a vague noise of protest in the back of his throat but Jude was already on his way to the kitchen, and it didn't seem worth the fight. He set up his paints while he listened to the tea kettle whistle, putting the appropriate globs of paint onto the pallet and weighing the canvass corners down with some of the paperback books he had stacked underneath his coffee table. He'd rather paint on his knees on the floor than drag the easel out, it would be fine this way — this whole thing was already weird enough.

Reds, he was going to need red. Gold, obviously; gold and one of the lighter browns so that he could shade Jude's hair. A light, skin tone color. He took the opportunity to mix the skin tone with the light brown so he had the option of shading again. Black for some of Jude's clothes. He mixed a few extra shades with his brushes of the reds and the golds, and could almost pretend this was normal. (No he couldn't.)

The tea kettle whistled and Jude came back, and Kieran sat back on his heels and considered. "You can sit on the couch," he said, "If that's alright, and you can sit however you'd like. There's books under the coffee table if you get bored, too." He smiled wryly at Jude. The sunlight coming in through the windows would catch Jude's hair there in a way that was really pleasing. The thought of painting Jude on Kieran's shitty couch near Kieran's general mess — it made his heart rate pick up, although he wished it didn't.

---

“Fine,” Jude agreed, moving towards the couch and dropping onto it, telling himself more forcefully that this was fine, this was fine and not strange at all. Well, beside the fact that he had never once forgotten how to sit on a couch until this precise moment; suddenly his back was stiff and his hands were awkwardly on his knees and his feet on the floor like he was going to spring up and flee in a second. And perhaps he should have tried to take stock of himself somewhere between the Augurey and now - should have at least bothered to glance in the reflection of the kettle or the back of a teaspoon or something - because now he was quietly cursing himself and more self-conscious than he had ever been and shifting in place on the couch, reconsidering.

Whether Kieran had sensed this burst of nerves or not, he had just provided a lifeline; books under the coffee table were an immediate rescue, and he leant forwards a little to scan the titles and pull one out. Not that it mattered, really; it was enough of a crutch already just sitting on his lap, something for his fingers to flick through. If he got bored, Kieran had said: as if Jude ever got bored, as if he possibly could be bored in Kieran’s company. (Not always for good reasons - but not always for bad, either.)

“Can you still talk while you paint, or do you need to - focus?” Jude said on that note, raising his eyebrows curiously as he looked over. If it wasn’t too much distraction, he would happily take conversation over reading, even if it was terribly mundane or a topic over his head like Kieran talking about paints. Still, Jude had crooked up a knee now and absently tucked his foot under him where he sat, like he was settling in to read, and was relaxing fractionally for it. If he didn’t look straight in front of him, maybe he could pretend there was not a canvas unfurled on the floorboards, or that Kieran was working on something else.

---