Although Lachlan agreed, Fallon couldn't help but feel as though she misstepped. Had he intended for the invitation to be just them? But for what purpose? "No other friends," she promised. Truthfully, the only other friend she might've thought of was Jesse, and that was a more awkward thought than she'd care to admit. "Just Malou, if she wanted to anyway. Magical beasts aren't her favorite thing."

Fallon had promised to stay away from the topic of his career, and, even as he made offhand comments himself, she intended to hold true to it. "Tell me more about the Hebrides. What was it like to grow up there?" She couldn't fathom it herself, having lived in the slums of London. To have such fresh air and space to move about must've been incredible.

  

"I promise there aren't many magical beasts away from the dragons, and my cousins would kill me if they found out I was bringing untrained people around," he said truthfully, now not even considering taking Fallon near the territories now that she'd invited Malou along. "I've got plenty of dragon models, though. Hopefully those will suffice." Small and harmless as they were, the figures had, on more than one occasion, tried to take a bite of of his pinky finger. If he hadn't been raised in the same area as the real things, he might have been awed by the magic.

"The Hebrides are... the Hebrides. Small Scottish population—mostly muggles, mind you. We prefer to keep to the less occupied ones. It's safer for everyone." It was truly a simple way of life, bar the backyard quidditch matches and the dragon accidents that happened every five or ten years. "Most of the MacFustys choose to stay there with their wives and kids. Lots of little ones toddling around nowadays." He smiled. Neither he nor Quillian were married with families, but he had plenty of cousins in his age range who were.

"The boys typically grow up to become dragon-keepers. It's tradition," he explained. He imagined more of the boys of the newest generation would take different career paths than the last, but most of the boys grew up surrounded by dragon imagery and tales of heroic dragon tamers. It was in their blood. "The men in the family definitely outnumber the women. My mother's a healer, and so's my sister. It's a help." He briefly wondered if, in their time in the tundra, Fallon had ever noticed the deep scar on his shoulder. Dragon accidents did not happen too often, but they left their mark when they did.

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"I'm not untrained," Fallon protested and shifted in his grasp to look at him. Untrained! She was a bloody auror, for Merlin's sake! While she had no practical experience with dragons, Fallon knew enough to keep herself safe. Hell, she could even apparate if she needed to. "I can handle myself around a dragon or two, thank you very much." Might've been presumptuous of her, but really, did he not know her?


Fallon reached behind her for her whiskey glass and had to stretch to retireve it without moving. If not for the high waist of her pajama bottoms (a pair of men's sleepwear) her long sleeve shirt sleepshirt might've exposed some skin. Whoops. She remained sitting up and out of his grasp, though her folded knees were still touching his, and sipped at the whiskey.

"Do the women ever have experiences with dragons?" She asked. Their last conversation about misogyny hadn't gone well, but she hoped he knew she didn't think him to be one anymore.

  

"You are untrained," he insisted, unwilling to be pushed on that topic. The last thing he needed was Fallon believing she could take on a fully-grown Hebridean Black. Even the toddlings were terrors. "A single stunning spell won't faze a dragon on the hunt. It's a learned art, not a skillset you can acquire from Hogwarts." She was lucky he wasn't a dragon-keeper; any one of his more volatile cousins might have taken her insistence as an insult. "There's a reason more people don't become dragon-keepers. We're raised to accept it. Anyone else who wants to do it is mad." He'd lost enough relatives to know the stinging truth of it.

He added a few extra inches between them as she wormed her way out of his arm to find her glass. He leaned forward and grabbed his own, taking a sip before placing it back on the table. He leaned back and looked at her, not knowing if her last question was a trap considering the one she'd just asked.

"... Not really," he answered after a moment's consideration. "It's not a job that most men are fit to do. I'll freely admit that eighteen-year-old me wanted nothing more than to escape the dragon reserves. Everyone leaves eventually. Your body gets you or the dragons do."

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"Fine," she huffed, still not convinced. Being fearful of the dragons was worse than being untrained. A stunning spell might not work, but it wasn't like she wanted to go incredibly near the dragons! She just wanted to watch them from afar. Surely, Lach could grant her that wish? "What if we just sat on a rock and watched them off in the distance? Do you need a skillset to do that?"

She raised her brow and took another sip of her whiskey. MacFusty's apparently thought women to be weak and feeble, how typical. "I guess I don't know enough about it to comment," she said tactfully after a long moment. If they used magic a woman was just as capable as a man, but she could understand the difference in physical strength between the sexes.

  

He rolled his eyes. There it was: a remnant of their pre-portkey relationship. "I think you know the answer to that one," he responded, unwilling to engage with her any longer about the skillset needed to handle dragons. They'd already been through it with the auror matter in the days leading up to the Quidditch World Cup, and there was nothing he wanted less than to revisit the same situation under a different name.

"I do hesitate taking two unwed ladies to the dragon territories without a proper dragonkeeper around," he said. He was completely willing to throw himself under the bus in that moment if it meant avoiding her scorn. "I may have to ask one of my cousins to accompany us."

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Fallon reached for one of the cookies that laid abandoned on the small table. It was a miracle any had survived the day, really, since Malou's baking was better than any Fallon had ever tasted. Merlin, if her roommate ever married she was going to have to make some sort of arrangement with the new housekeeper to steal some cookies on occasion. She took a small bite and rolled her eyes with a smirk. Sometimes, Lachlan was too smart for his own good.

"What if it was just me?" Fallon asked. Malou likely wouldn't want to join anyway, what harm could come from not asking her in the first place? "She's really not a huge fan of beasts. I'm not sure why I asked in the first place ..."

  

Lachlan watched her carefully as she took a cookie off the table, a smirk on his face. She'd invited Miss Skovsgaard, then uninvited Miss Skovsagaard; he couldn't quite figure out what she was playing at.

"I would feel less guilty leading a trained auror to the edge of dragon territory," he said with a challenging quirk of his brows. "At least then I wouldn't be to blame for the deaths of two innocent ladies on top of the one from earlier this summer." He snorted at his own words. Coping wasn't going very well, but he was at the stage where he laughed about it to pretend it hadn't really happened.

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"She can join us another time then," Fallon grinned. Dragons! She hadn't ever thought she'd have an opportunity to see one, even if it was watching from a distant rock. Merlin, what a sight that would be!

Her grin faded at his snort and she handed him a second cookie from the plate. Chocolate wouldn't fix him or help him learn better coping mechanisms, but it would taste good at least. "I promise you will never be responsible for my death. If anything, based on our track record I'll be responsible for yours." The comment was made easily, lightly, almost as though that thought didn't haunt her constantly.

  

She would join then another time. He felt his heart jump in his chest—out of relief, he assumed. Hauling a gentile healer around the Hebrides was one of the least responsible things he could do, he told himself. Merlin forbid anything happen to her. Fallon took the words right out of his mouth. At least if anything went wrong with the two of them (although he had no intention of leading her into a dangerous situation) it was unlikely to be reported as him leading an innocent, pretty young woman to her death. At least Fallon had some training that would come in use in the event of an emergency, even if he wouldn't empower her by stating it.

"Hopefully our run-ins with death ended last month," he said quietly, taking a bite of a cookie she'd given him. He reached out mindlessly and squeezed her wrist as he chewed, a gesture of solidarity and something of a promise. He still didn't know how to navigate the arctic tundra, but the Hebrides was his land.

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"Hopefully," Fallon replied with a shrug.
Given her profession was one of, if not the most, dangerous professions there was, Fallon doubted her run ins with death wouldn't end soon. Dark wizards had a penchant for casting unforgivable curses, and one wrong move would find the blast of green light hitting her square in the chest. Fallon gave up the notion of living until old age long ago. Even if the spells didnt get her, something else would. It was just the nature of the job.

She leant back against the sofa, her knees curled up under her as she continued to face him. The distance between them wasn't as far as it initially was when she was in her preferred spot, but Fallon wasn't close enough to snuggle in with him either. His hand on her wrist was comforting, though she did wonder if he had always been this easy with physical affection. Or, the more likely case, perhaps it was just her he was more comfortable with.

  

As a silence fell over them, Lach withdrew his hand and leaned back into the sofa, his eyes still on her. He looked at her quietly, not looking at any particular feature, but her as a whole. She'd changed since their misadventure. Maybe it was the circles under her eyes. Maybe she was a little thinner, a little gaunter. Maybe her expression was darker, less luminous and confident as it had once been. He couldn't put a finger on it, but the change was evident.

"What are you thinking?" he asked, knowing anything she had to say would be more interesting—and likely less infuriating—than anything he could say to her.

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Without the steadying presence of his hand on her wrist, Fallon shifted back into her corner. It was colder without the additional weight of her blanket, but Fallon could always retrieve the quilt from her bed if she grew desperate enough. Lachlan was comfortable and alive, she couldn't ask for much more.

His question, while expected, caught her somewhat off guard. Fallon still wasn't sure how to phrase the thoughts swirling through her head without coming across as odd. Sighing, she poured more whiskey into both their glasses and looked down towards the amber liquid. "Do you find you need more physical touch now? It never phased me before, never even thought of it as something I was missing, and now I can't spend more than ten minutes around someone without wanting to hold their hand or ... I don't know. Do you understand what I'm trying to say?"

  

He expected her to say something about work, or about Malou. Maybe she was thinking about their physical statue, or to their tundra misadventure; there were plenty things to say about that. Instead, she asked him a question—one so personal in nature that it took him aback. His eyes briefly widened but quickly returned to their stare, and he remained quiet for a moment while he pondered it.

"I wouldn't say that I need it," he said quietly, thinking about the times he'd jerked out of his mother's embrace or even away from a gentle touch on the shoulder from his father as he passed him in the sitting room. He'd never liked touches; Fallon was the exception to the rule, and even then he rarely did it knowingly. Touch had become the language of survival when faced with freezing temperatures. It had been a way to communicate what he couldn't say when he began wheezing, to ensure that the other had lived through the night. "I'll stop it if you don't like it," he added, even though she'd just directly contradicted his words in her explanation. It made him wonder: had there been times where she wanted to hold his hand? His gaze dropped to where her hand wrapped around her glass.

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Fallon had looked at him briefly enough to see his widened eyes. Perhaps that was the wrong question to ask. She should've made up a random thought and ran with that instead. Only, this was Lachlan. If she couldn't be honest with him and Malou, who could she be honest with? Fallon dropped her gaze back to her glass. Merlin, the tundra had truly messed with her head.

Did she want him to stop, though? He ought to, seeing as she and Jesse were moving towards being involved. If Fallon discovered he was touching other women (however platonically) she would be green with envy. Worse still, she might insist they part ways. A pang tore at her heart at the thought. Losing Jesse, losing what they had the potential to become, would be devastating. However, what if denying Lachlan now meant they could no longer be comfortable around one another? What if it meant whatever friendship they developed in the tundra came to a grinding halt?

Her silence had to be telling, but Fallon soon cleared her throat and fought the rising blush on her cheeks. Once upon a time, she might've asked for him to never stop touching her. "No," she eventually answered. Somehow, she'd have to make Jesse understand what Lachlan was to her. "I mean, we probably shouldn't ... like we did in the tundra. But, like I said, physical touch calms me now. It's bizarre, I know..."

  

He watched her, finding himself more frustrated than ever that he was terrible at reading silence. He'd always been quick to make up his mind, even when it ended up hurting him in the end, but this—his relationship with Fallon—was something he was unable to label with any sort of brash decisiveness. Her inability to be straightforward, even when he didn't know what straightforward would sound like, made it all the more infuriating.

She didn't want him to stop, but they should stop, but what he did calmed her anyways so she wasn't sure. Out of all the things she could have said, it was the least direct and the most confusing. His brows furrowed, and corners of his lips tugged downwards into a frown.

He nodded, an affirming hum leaving his lips. "Wouldn't want to give anyone the wrong impression," he murmured, his gaze locking on hers as he spoke. He stayed quiet afterwards, unwilling to break eye contact. If she wouldn't say what she meant, maybe she would show it.

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