August 19, 2020 – 5:48 AM
Cassius Lestrange — Played by Beanie
If Cash twitched at the phrase surprise birthday when applied to the Lestranges, then - who could blame him? He let his body settle back into stillness, hoped that Gallivan had not noticed the way he had gone briefly, fully rigid.
"Not in the same sense, no," Cash said instead. "We're not the sort for - public displays of affection."
Talking about his family like this, casually; it was dangerous, and could lead him down a dangerous path. He did not know why he was doing it, either, and had not thought it through that much. Gallivan felt safe in a way that many did not.
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August 26, 2020 – 11:16 PM
Theo had noticed - well, something. A sudden flinch, a fleeting frozen look on his face... he didn’t know what had done it, hoped he was not to blame, thought it better not to inquire; he just shifted his gaze forwards, out onto the darkened pitch, waiting until he supposed it might be safe to look again.
But it was difficult not to react to the offhand way he answered it, and although Theodore was worried he had pitched the conversation off-kilter somehow, his shoulders twitched in a suppressed laugh, pressing his lips together to keep it in. He shouldn’t laugh. It was hardly funny.
He leaned back now, slumped backwards and feigning preoccupation with stretching his legs out beneath the row in front. “And if they ask where you’ve been all evening?” Theo remarked. Practice had ended hours ago, the sun had practically gone down, sitting around aimlessly in an empty quidditch stadium was almost no one’s idea of normal. Maybe the Lestranges, not sounding... close, wouldn’t care all that much where Cassius was or what he did. Perhaps in their house they didn’t even notice. (Veronica would. Veronica definitely would.) “What’ll you tell them?”
December 5, 2020 – 9:40 PM
Cassius Lestrange — Played by Beanie
A beat passed while Cash considered, tilted his head. "They're not likely to ask," he admitted, tone very neutral. He wandered - all the time, almost, because it beat staring at the ceiling of his room and running his thumb over the rough spot of a pocketwatch he had bought at a pawn shop for someone else.
Sometimes Cash thought that even if Eli had lived, he still would have slid into this - alone.
"Were you close with your father?" Cash asked; it was an over-close question, given the relationship that he and Theodore had, but came almost unbidden for a simple reason - he wanted to know Theodore Gallivan, and he didn't.
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December 11, 2020 – 12:44 AM
He had nothing to say to that answer, didn’t know if the lack of interest was better or worse than having to disappoint people’s well-meaning interest with disappointing truths. He had never felt so tempted to - go off like his father had, somewhere he knew no one and had never been and where no one would be interested in him.
And then came that question. It was a good question, and he had no idea how to answer it. Yes would have been easy, gone unquestioned, made sense enough to explain away all - this... but no would have been as simple to say and not quite wrong, either. Theodore scratched vigorously at the back of his hand as if he might unearth an answer there. Stupid, stupid, to want to answer honestly just because someone had asked.
“It’s... complicated,” he echoed eventually, stealing Cassius’ word, before looking in surprise at the patch of reddened skin he had just created and covering it with his other hand. “Was complicated,” he corrected automatically. “I was nearly always angry at him for something,” Theo admitted, in pursuit of an explanation. Theo had always made things more difficult for everyone, hadn’t he? He’d always been unhappy about something, never been good with change... when their father had told them about magic after their mother had died; when he had decided to remarry; when he had transformed in the forest and nearly killed him; when he had up and left without warning to let the world call him dead. Until that last, yes, he supposed they had been close. But those were his father’s choices, and he still didn’t have to agree with them.
He made a scoffing noise in his throat, determined not to look Lestrange’s way. “But I miss him, too.”
December 12, 2020 – 10:28 PM
Cassius Lestrange — Played by Beanie
A lot of fathers were like that, Cash thought - people their age were always angry at their parents, and most of them (not all, but most) would miss their parents if they lost them. Cash tilted his head back; looking at Theodore out of the corner of his eyes, he could only really see his profile, and the darkening summer sky above them.
He had the sense that Gallivan was being honest with him, at least mostly, and Cash sort of respected him for it - he was very rarely entirely honest with people. The truth was difficult to wrangle.
"You loved him," Cash guessed, because that was how most people felt about their fathers, even if they were angry a lot of the time. Cash didn't, obviously; he had no illusions that Lucius liked him, either, even though he had allowed him to live. Familial obligation was different from love.
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January 8, 2021 – 12:02 AM
He might have protested, at that. The truth was he didn’t know anymore, he wasn’t sure. It had all tipped over to anger now, the simmering kind that couldn’t be scrubbed away. Still, the past tense gave him an out, a false security. Of course he’d loved him. That was an easy answer.
“Yeah, well,” Theo said, casting a begrudging look at Lestrange, head tilted as if to reproach him for making him say something most people probably felt. (He could have asked don’t you?, but what would anyone say in disagreement?) “You’d better not tell anyone I admitted it.”
He breathed out, a little restless, to disguise the sigh it was. “Not that it’s much use now.” The love or the anger, for that matter. If he got over it, maybe he would actually be able to bring himself to care about the team again.
January 11, 2021 – 10:21 PM
Cassius Lestrange — Played by Beanie
"Sometimes absence has a weight, I think," Cash said finally. Absence had a weight, and he felt it - pressing down on him, in on him, constantly. And Eli was not the same as Nathaniel Gallivan, and their losses had to be different, but he felt like he could see it - that weight, in Theodore Gallivan. It was as if they were empty in the same way.
"I used to love Quidditch," Cash said, which was true - he had loved Quidditch like it was a person, and there was an extent to which he had sold his soul for it. "You did too."
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February 12, 2021 – 12:39 AM
Theo made a low hum of agreement in his throat. “Yeah. I guess.”
So Lestrange knew something about - loss. He could not quite work out who or what he had lost, but he knew the feeling too well not to. (And Theo’s loss wasn’t even - real loss, his father was still presumably living somewhere - but there was still the absence.)
Was it - the love of quidditch, then? Or was quidditch, like in Theo’s case, just a secondary casualty?
“D’you ever feel like you’re - a completely different person now?” Theo had loved it, he had cared about so many things, and now he could barely pull himself out of a bad mood when it hit, could look at himself and find scarcely anything of who he’d used to be. As if he’d lost himself too and barely noticed.
