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1.
Marilyn's familiar is a slim black cat with eyes that seem luminously large in its head, a bright viridian green contrast to its fur. It's taken to sitting on the arm of Mark's chair when Marilyn isn't there, watching him turn the pages of The Outsiders with one eye half-closed sardonically, like it thinks Mark couldn't be any less subtle if he tried. Mark ignores both the cat, and then Sy when he returns from lunch break, rubbing at his chin with the sleeve of his robes and sighing, "I don't think the Wizengamot's much inclined in your favor, but let's see what we can do, shall we?"
Familiars aren't as popular with witches and wizards in Britain as they are on the other side of the Atlantic, Mark learns: it's a practice popular in Iceland, mostly, where their cats and owls and even the occasional falcon are just as valuable as tools of sorcery as wands are, but there are also high concentrations of them in Greenland, and along the northeastern coast of Canada and the United States as well. Mark doesn't know if Marilyn originally hails from any of these places: her accent is roundly Welsh, indistinguishable and generalized.
"Do you usually put this much effort into figuring out every little thing about someone?" Marilyn wonders, wry, after he tries (with the barest attempt at subtlety, because Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't know subtlety if it transfigured him into a watermelon) to get her to use "route," "caramel," and "asthma" in one sentence, which is the quickest and most surefire way to determine if any accent is faked. "It seems like it'd be too much work."
"On the contrary," Mark replies, drumming his fingers. He misses his wand the way he imagines he'd miss a limb -- all wands are checked, weighed, and kept at the dungeon entrance. Nobody's allowed to have their wands in the Wizengamot anymore. It makes people feel safer, don't you know, after the war and all? Mark, who already deeply distrusts the Ministry, tries not to feel emasculated. "Observation is the easiest task in the world."
Marilyn makes a noncommittal noise. Her cat flicks its ear, a gesture Mark can't interpret.
"You don't have the makings of a Dark wizard, Mark, no matter what you might think," she offers after a long pause. "He was your friend, not your minion."
"I don't need friends," Mark snaps back, automatic, but she just levels a look at him, like she can see the rebuke for what it really is: the lash-out of a schoolboy, alone and attacked, and nothing near truthful.
Mark is nineteen years old.
Inside the chamber, it is dank and cold and damp, and Mark can taste centuries of spent magic in the back of his throat like the bitter aftertaste of a pint: people are like children in the Wizengamot, he's learned, on trial and tiny and frightened and they do magic unconsciously. It leaks out of them like sweat. Despair's here, too, he thinks, and fear, and triumph, if he could distinguish the code for one from the code of another -- each person feels them differently, it's true, but it all tastes startlingly similar, like bleeding magic. It gathers in the rafters and dark stones of the ceiling; his eyes track back and forth above his head, wondering what kind of magic those stones have absorbed over the centuries, what kind of personalities they might have now.
He hears the distasteful noise from the other side of the room that tells him Gretchen has noticed his inattention.
"-- but this is Mark we're talking about," Eduardo is saying, down below in the witness chair. Mark deliberately does not look at his face, but can do nothing to avoid the flatness in his voice. "He once brewed Veritaserum in fourth year just to show up Professor Slughorn for intimating that nobody under NEWT-year could even attempt it, but he still managed to Splinch himself the first time he Apparated and left half of his digestive track in central London. I thought he needed protecting."
He knows without looking that Eduardo is pressing his lips together into a resentful line. It is arrogance to think that you could possibly know another human being better than they know themselves, but if there was anybody, it'd be Eduardo, and Mark doubts he even knows he's doing it. He certainly kissed those lips enough to have a good idea of their every expression, he muses disinterestedly.
"I didn't know whether to dress for business or dress for a party, so I tried a little of both," Eduardo continues. "But it wasn't either of those things."
"What was it?"
Eduardo's head jerks. "An ambush."
On its haunches, sitting on the arm of Mark's chair, Marilyn's familiar puts its ears back.
"Don't look at me like that," Mark tells it, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers and wishing he could just go and disappear into his book. The cat simply watches him, its eyes green, green, green, Slytherin-green.
2.
He only manages to thieve one of the rolls from under the cloth before his mother snaps a dishtowel in his direction, admonishing.
"At least wash your hands first, you miscreant!" goes Hal from the counter, sounding crotchety and old and severely put-upon. He pushes his toasting setting dials down into a frown. Mark takes a bite of the roll, hollowing his cheeks out because it's hot.
His mother snorts.
"Serves you right. And why don't you tell your father to finish whatever he's doing," she adds, running the dishtowel compulsively and distractedly over her her hands. "Dinner should be ready in a couple minutes. We're celebrating, so tell him to try to look nice. It's not every day your only son gets a perfect score on the NEWTs."
Mark mmhmms around his mouthful of crusty hot bread, slipping out of the kitchen as Mrs. Zuckerberg starts corralling the crockery on their way to the kitchen table, which on a good day is a little bit like herding cats.
He passes through the quiet and the cool of the hallway, heading for the stairs, when he hears the loud crack! of someone Apparating at the end of the lane and freezes. They never get visitors way out here -- at least not the kind that Apparate. His dad's a Muggle and his mom's a witch, but they live rather secluded lives from both those worlds and they're happy like that. Outside, he hears the gravel of their drive crunching under two hurried sets of feet, overly loud in the rural nighttime. He goes over to the window, flicking the curtain back.
In the darkening gloom, he catches sight of two figures, a man and a woman, striding quickly up to their front steps, their robes snapping around their legs. The woman's hair is done up elaborately, and she reaches out like she's trying to catch the man's arm. He throws her off, passing the low rows of Mark's father's garden, wand arm rising.
"Shit," Mark breathes, dropping the roll and diving inside his overlarge shirt for his wand, just as the door blows backwards off its hinges.
For a second, there's nothing but noise: wood splintering, the grandfather clock yelping "rude!", Mrs. Zuckerberg's startled shriek of fright from the kitchen and Mr. Zuckerberg yelling upstairs, and then Mark registers Divya Narendra in his doorway, dress robes elegantly collared up to his throat and his eyes blazing fiercer than Mark has ever seen them.
"Reparo," Mark mutters, flicking his wand at the splintered remains of his front door.
Divya is on him in a flash, hand fisting in his shirt and wand-tip pressed hard into his jugular. "You," comes out, snarled out between his teeth. "You stole our idea, you miserable, backstabbing --"
"Div!" And the woman's right there, her own wand out and her eyes wide, like this is something she's never seen before. "Div, stop!"
"Hey, KC," goes Mark, inanely. KC, short for Kalliope (he's assuming the C stands for her middle name, though he's never been clear on what it is,) is a former Ravenclaw and twin sister to Illyria Bagina, who'd been the Slytherin prefect for their year with the Winklevoss twins. The first time Mark Zuckerberg scored higher than KC Bagina on the end-of-term exams she tried to put a Jelly-Legs Jinx on him, but she hadn't mastered it yet and instead gave one of the suits of armor a very bad case of the jitterbug. Divya'd asked her to Hogsmeade in the May of their fifth year: Mark remembers, because he'd gone over to the Ravenclaw table to do it, and Slytherins weren't allowed to just go to the other House's tables, and there'd been a scene. Illyria and Christy hadn't let the subject drop in the Slytherin common room for weeks.
She spares him a panicked look. "Hey, Mark," she goes, because it's practically programmed into Slytherins and Ravenclaws to say the dumbest things under duress. "I'm so so sorry, I didn't know he was going to do this --" her eyes flick behind Mark, to where he assumes his mother has come to investigate. "Mrs. Zuckerberg, ma'am," she adds a moment later, confirming it. "We didn't -- I'm so sorry."
"Sorry, Mrs. Zuckerberg, but I'm not," and that's Divya, wandtip thrust so hard into Mark's throat that he makes a strangled noise of pain. Divya is seventeen, Mark is seventeen, KC is seventeen and nobody knows their own strength. "Your son is a thieving, cheating weasel of a wizard, and --"
"Div!" KC cuts in, trying to push herself between Divya and Mark.
He makes a noise like something died in his throat, his eyes narrowed to vicious slits, mere inches from Mark's own. "How did I never see this coming?" he goes, seemingly to himself. "I've read everything correctly so far except for this ..." And Mark believes him, because Divya was the best in their year at Divination, much to the bemusement of everybody, because Divya was Muggleborn; there's no way he could have come from any prominent Seer line.
KC keeps her voice calm. "Come on, let's just go, this isn't the time for this. You can file with the Wizengamot --"
Divya's head twists around to face her, fast as a striking snake, and he hisses out, "I don't want to take him to the Wizengamot," his voice rising. "I want to hire Death Eaters to Crucio the shit out of him!"
Mark will claim later, to anyone who asks -- his father, the Improper Use of Magic Squad, the healers at St Mungo's, and then the Wizengamot in their turn -- that he didn't know his mother was going to do that. One moment, she was in the kitchen, making a celebratory dinner for Mark getting his NEWT results back, and the next, she was screaming, hexing Divya with the worst she had because that is my SON and don't you dare bring that into my house never in MY house, KC was crying, and everything was pandemonium.
3.
When Mark finally wakes up, there's an enormous Ministry owl waiting for him, sitting on top of his kitchen counter and hooting at him balefully when he darkens the doorway. It disdainfully extends a talon, holding out a letter in his direction, which isn't Howler-red because the Ministry likes to pretend it's more sophisticated than that, but it might as well be: Mark is fully expecting it to yell at him the instant he opens it. There are worse things to receive via post than Howlers.
He debates, for a beat, simply ignoring the owl and moving around it to fetch the jam for toast, but the obsessive-compulsive part of him makes an internalized strangulated sound at the thought of leaving an owl on his counter, where he prepares food, and he balks.
"You're a Ministry owl," Mark tells it, folding his arms across his chest. "I wouldn't expect the slightest modicum of manners from you."
Shaking its leg pointedly, the owl hoots again, as if saying, so glad we understand each other.
But he's saved from having to deal with it by the loud clanging coming from the front room; someone's trying to Floo him. He drops his arms and lifts his eyebrows in triumph at the owl, which screeches indignantly at him as he turns his back on it, loud enough to make his ears ring. Grimacing, Mark escapes to the next room.
He bends down in front of the fire grate. It clangs again, louder and more klaxon-like than a ringing telephone.
"I'm right here!" Mark yells at it, uselessly, thumbing up a bit of Floo powder and pitching amongst the logs.
Fire springs up, flaring green, and the next second, Erica Albright's head appears in his fireplace.
Mark groans, rocking back onto his heels and stuffing his hands in his pockets. Out of all the people that could be calling on him right now, Erica will probably have the least amount of sympathy. She has never tolerated his bullshit in her entire life. Gryffindors, he thinks, in a vague long-suffering way.
"If I told you I wasn't decent, will you go away?" he deadpans at her.
She narrows her eyes in return, contemplative. There's a fire to that look, and Mark wonders, dryly, if it's metaphorical or simply a result of actual Floo fire. "No," she answers. "Are you going to let me in?"
Mark makes a noise, removing his hands from his pockets and crabwalking back far enough so that she can clamber through the grate. She's in Muggle clothes, jeans and a loose jewel-toned tunic that looks like it has to be a gift, and she takes the time to shake gray ash from her hair and sleeves.
Then she strides over to him and delivers a swift kick to his shins, schoolgirl-like.
"Farm animals, Mark?" she roars at him, throwing up her hands.
Still on the floor, Mark cringes.
"All of wizarding Britain is sucking up to you, wanting to be your friend, and you get caught torturing farm animals?"
"Testing!" Mark protests immediately. "I needed to test something and it wasn't like I could just start taking volunteers! I don't know what people are so worked up about, none of the animals were inhumanly hurt -- well, okay, there was that cow that accidentally got displaced to the Sahara, but that's fine. They like cows there!" She looks like she's about to kick him again, so he glares up at her. "Oh, come on, can't anyone take a joke anymore?"
"No!" she goes, high-pitched and furious. "Mark! How stupid are you! It's better to be accused of raising Inferi!"
Mark snorts, but doesn't argue. On the ph scale of morality, animating dead corpses is possibly one of the basest things to do, like pure ammonia on the soul, but on the scale of plausibility, it's very easy to disprove that Mark has ever raised Inferi. Willingly and maliciously performing spells on animals, however ... not only will Priori Incantarum on Mark's wand show that it's true, that's the kind of rumor that sticks with somebody. That's the kind of rumor that will destroy careers.
Dark wizards always got their start on animals, they'll say.
There's not a witch or wizard that went bad who wasn't in Slytherin, they'll say.
Erica dispels a hard breath through her nose, and then her shoulders sag. She drops down onto the carpet next to Mark. "You're an asshole," she mutters mutinously, delivering another kick to the vicinity of his ankle, gentler this time.
"You're a bitch," he returns, without heat.
She tilts a look at him, brown-eyed and sad, and murmurs, "They'll take away your license for this, you know. You're not going to be able to open that wandshop now."
In the kitchen, the owl screeches again. Mark's spine curves, defeated. "Yeah. I know."
4.
(But Mark, goes the voice in his head that he has unceremoniously dubbed his conscience, because it sounds like the perfect blend of Erica's common sense and Eduardo's concern. He's not like us. He can see thestrals, which Mark already knows, because he remembers watching him pat at empty air in front of the carriages at the start of term one year.
It's not uncommon, he thinks back, defensive. Not amongst that generation.)
"You know," Mark says, idly stirring the contents of his drink ("not that this isn't nice and all," the toothpick says, "but do you mind just hurrying up and eating that martini olive? I've had a rather long day,") and looking up through his eyelashes. "I think I like you a lot better when you're not using the Imperius Curse to get me to go into business with you."
Sean grins. A drink appears in his hand so fast it might as well have gotten there via Summoning Charm, and he slides it across the table.
5.
Outside the council flats, a group of little girls are drawing hopscotch lines on the cement, the beads in their hair clacking together. One of them's a witch, Mark's pretty sure, although he doesn't think she knows it yet: she almost blurs as she jumps, that unconscious burst of magic children make when they don't know better.
Realizing what he must look like, standing there creeping on a bunch of girls, he straightens up and shakes himself off, heading into the mail room. It's a Muggle estate, but there's a set of cheap, low-end flats for wizards here, too, tucked sideways and out of sight, although not very well hidden: the fourth row of mailboxes from the bottom on the back wall has a tendency to sneeze loudly during allergy season.
"Gasundheit," Mark tells it, kneeling down in front of it.
"Dank you, dank you," it replies, and when he leans his shoulder against it, it lets him fall through, like the barrier at Platform 9 3/4 does. He finds himself in a low corridor, torch-lit the way wizard residence's always are, because Merlin forbid if anybody ever figures out how to incorporate electrical wiring into wizarding buildings: he swears, their technology hasn't been modernized since the Dark Ages. He heads down the hall, passing a couple beaten-up brooms propped up against the wall and a pair of galloshes, hunched down on someone's welcome mat and warbling to themselves piteously. He turns the corner, digging in the pocket of his robes for his key, which he still can't find even as he reaches the door labeled Saverin, E. and Lee, C.
Either his pockets are too deep or his hands are shaking too badly.
Fortunately, the knocker just sighs at him fondly and says, "I know who you are, dear," and the door swings inwards, because of course all of Eduardo's belongings are as trusting as he is. He should talk to Christy about their security.
He steps inside.
"Impedimenta!" a voice cries out, and a blast of red light jets past, inches from Mark's nose. The heavy burgundy curtains on the window go up in flames.
Mark sighs, and pulls out his wand. "Aguamenti," he goes helpfully, dousing them. They smolder feebly.
The rest of the flat looks just as recently demolished. Christy's head appears around the doorframe to her bedroom. There's a horn sticking out at an odd angle from her temple, green and curling like a ram's. He's never seen that one before and takes a moment to admire the creativity.
"Oh, hello, Mark, there you are," she goes, cheerfully. "Can you tell Wardo he's being a pissy, self-centered bitch and he's completely missing the point?"
Only two people in the whole of the British isles are allowed to call Eduardo "Wardo," and both of them are currently standing in this room.
"Wardo," Mark goes obediently. "Your girlfriend is always right."
"She is not!" Eduardo finally shows himself, popping up from behind the overturned sofa, but he ducks immediately as Christy fires another hex his way. The end table behind him turns into a bowl of petunias, which promptly lose all their petals, drooping despondently.
"She is, and once you admit this, she'll stop setting your shit on fire."
"Our shit," Eduardo corrects, muffled. "How come it's only my shit once it's been destroyed?" His arm snakes out, a jet of blue light streaming towards Christy, who yelps and ducks backwards. Something thuds loudly in her room. "Sorry!" Eduardo adds, sounding genuinely contrite, because he's never felt quite right hexing his girlfriend in the middle of an argument.
"Hey," Mark tries, but they aren't listening to him.
"That was my hair, Wardo! You just singed off some of my hair! Do you know how long it takes to grow back!"
"We can spell it back, honestly, there are reversal potions for that kind of thing."
"You know it never grows back right, argh, show your face so I can hex your nose off!"
"HEY!" Mark roars.
"Christy, don't you think you're overreacting just a little --"
"Overreacting? What is your problem, you lily-livered, stupid, mugwumping --"
"Okay, fine," Mark throws up his hands, impatient. "No big deal. I just thought I should come by and tell you that I filed for bankruptcy today."
Silence doesn't so much as fall as lands at that, heavy and uncomfortable, but it does the trick.
Eduardo comes out first, pushing himself over the side of the sofa, hands outstretched placatingly. He's got enormous, oozing, pus-filled boils on his face -- they're Christy's specialty, those, and if she's feeling vindictive enough, sometimes they'll last for days. Christy appears, too, her eyes flared open and her head lopsided-looking because of the horn and the missing inches of hair, and the next instant both of them have their arms around Mark, pressing into him from either side.
"Oh, honey, oh, honey," murmurs Christy, sounding heartbroken, and hearing it, something cracks inside Mark, something that'd gone crystalline and cold when his solicitor had shook hands with the Gringotts representative, the both of them calmly and professionally crushing everything Mark had been working for, like it was just something they did before lunch. He grips at the back of Christy and Eduardo's shirts, hanging on.
"Mark," goes Wardo, pressing his face into the side of Mark's, a brief brush of his mouth against his hairline. "Mark, Mark, if we had anything, anything to spare, we'd give it to you, you know we would."
But you gambled it all away on that dragon's blood venture in Bosnia and you read the weather wrong, I know, Mark thinks, not looking at him.
"We would," Eduardo says again, faithful.
Christy makes a low, affirmative noise, stretching her neck up to kiss Mark's face too, and he wishes, for one soft, weak moment, that he could just stay here, tucked between them like they're his Patronus Charm, and never leave.
and one.
The first place they're able to afford is this dark, smoky pigeon-hole, well off the beaten path and growing a particular kind of carnivorous mold in the back room. Uncomfortably small for a shop and smelling peculiarly like burnt chicken, it's too close to Knockturn Alley for Christy's comfort.
"A shop run by Slytherins, with Knockturn Alley just around the corner?" she goes, worrying at her bottom lip as she sorts ingredients with a flick of her wand. Her eyes dart to the window, like she's expecting some unsavory character with a wandering eye and a balaclava to come creeping by. It's noon, though, so the sun's shining directly down onto the street for once, and the only thing the window looks out on is a portly wizard in a pointed hat enjoying a sundae under the street sign. "It gives the wrong sort of impression. It won't be good for business."
"I know that." Mark doesn't need to be told about the value of appearances. "And if for some reason it should matter to anyone, we'll tell them Eduardo's the owner. It's not technically a lie insomuch as it is an omission, and everyone loves a Hufflepuff."
Christy tilts an open palm in his direction, as if admitting he has a point. Mark glances towards the back room -- which is off-limits to everyone until Chris Hughes comes back with the Ministry-sanctioned fumigation spells for the mold, so everything they need to store is currently stacked in precarious leaning towers out here, which doesn't do anything for the space problem -- and then heads for the stairs. It's not any less cluttered up there; he clambers over tightly-packed boxes and sidles by a possibly-cursed coatrack (which hisses at him menacingly, which Mark has always thought was rather congenial, for a coatrack,) and into his workroom. It's the only room in the whole shop that looks even vaguely lived in. It has a window that, according to the realtor, has a charming view of the rest of Diagon Alley, but in reality has a charming view of the brickwork of the neighboring building.
He leaves the door open so he can hear what goes on downstairs (Christy, muttering spellwork and then going, "hey, Noodles, why is there a vial here labelled 'pixie testicles'? Please don't tell me Mark actually uses those," and Dustin -- who got the nickname "Noodles" for reasons nobody can explain to Mark with a straight face -- laughingly returning, "oh, but they're so magically potent, don't you know," and Christy, glass clinking as she presumably quickly puts the vials aside, "Merlin's beard, stop talking,") and leans his elbows on his work table.
"We are going to need a bigger office someday," he says out loud, pulling his latest project towards him: a long, slender cutting of rowan, not quite distinguishable as a wand yet.
Mark has a whole bundle of rowan tied up downstairs with the supplies, it being the most magical of woods and also, consequently, the most expensive. Mark's been looking into elm, holly, even rosewood (which made for very brittle wands but very powerful spellcasting, though it did make everything smell funny, he wasn't sure what to do about that yet,) but none of it's as malleable as rowan. Rowan can learn, the way no other kind of wood can.
"And we're not going to be able to stay in London," he continues, thoughtful. "Not with Olivander's so close, it's not a good idea to encroach on the old guard's territory, but this is a good start. We'll get the publicity here that we need, and then we'll move. It's a temporary thing."
He rubs a knuckle along his bottom lip. On the corner of his desk, shoved back almost to the point where it's threatening to teeter off the edge, is a framed photo of his parents and Eduardo from when they were last on holiday. Eduardo's in the middle, taller than both the Zuckerbergs, and they all wave when Mark looks at them, beaming as wide as they do in real life. His mother's hair is everywhere when she leans up to kiss Eduardo's cheek, and he goes red.
There's a commotion downstairs, a three-tone chime of the front door opening, and then Dustin's jubilant voice yelling, "Saverin's back, and he's got food!"
Mark hears the familiar cadence of Eduardo laughing and replying, of Christy gleefully asking a question, and plastic bags rustling.
"Oh my god, kebabs," goes Dustin. His normal volume carries just fine on its own. "Muggle food! Saverin, you are my favorite, my arteries and my waistline thank you for your generous contribution! How went the exchanging of the money this time? No arguing with the vendors about how paper couldn't possibly be money this time, hmm?"
"Shut up, Dustin," says Eduardo's voice, clearer now from the bottom of the stairs, his tone dry and tolerant. "And eat your kebab."
Like Mark, Dustin comes from a blended family and has been converting Muggle money to Galleons and visa versa since he was old enough to have pocket money and the inclination to spend it, and he never gets tired of making fun of everybody else for the culture shock of moving back and forth. Sometimes Mark thinks Dustin got Sorted into the wrong House.
Christy agrees with him, those times Dustin accidentally breaks one of Mark's potions by existing in its general vicinity and they have to haul him back to his own flat because he's too delirious to Apparate on his own, and nobody in their right mind would put Dustin on a broomstick and expect him to wind up in the right place. "Who on earth put you in Ravenclaw?" she asks, tipping Dustin back onto his bed, where he lolls around, giggling shrilly and twitching like some invisible hand keeps digging for his ribs. "Seriously, Mark, do you remember that time he misaimed a spell and accidentally transplanted Professor Flitwick's eyeballs onto a cactus?"
"Yeah." Nobody could figure out how Dustin did it, which Mark supposes is true to Ravenclaw form, and so Professor Flitwick had to go around Hovering the cactus in front of him so he could see until the spell wore off, much to the continuing amusement of the students.
"You loooooooove it," Dustin drags out, reaching up to tug on one of Christy's golden hoop earrings, ignoring the grimace of discomfort she makes. "You love Ravenclaws! And Gryffindors! Although not Hufflepuffs, because Mark would be watching. Mark watches like a hawk. Mark watches like a watching ... creepy ... watcher."
"I'm standing right here," Mark sighs.
"Aha!" Dustin jabs a finger at him accusingly. "I rest my case!"
Back in the present, he snorts, listening to Christy and Dustin bicker over napkins downstairs, and says to the wand-in-progress, "Yeah, I think I should look into hiring new employees. Too bad Alice would rather spend all her time with the Animagus Registration Committee than come work in a shop," referring to Christy's smiley best friend, who wanted to take all the snide comments she got during their Hogwarts years about her very large teeth and turn them into one of her strengths. Most people, upon applying themselves to the nastily complicated process of becoming an Animagi, want to become big creatures like tigers or bears, to feel power they would never possess otherwise, but Alice wants to become a jackrabbit.
It works for her, though, because she's already got job proposals from several wilderness research groups, including Rolf Scamander's, because a jackrabbit can go a lot of places a wizard can't.
"Which is all well and good, bully for her," Mark explains. "Up until she gets herself eaten. So we'll have to find someone else, to help Chris out before he has a coronary, or accidentally-on-purpose mis-Apparates to Fiji and forgets to come home. An intern. Just think," he murmurs, wonderingly. "We'll be the kind of shop that has interns. Ashleigh, maybe, from the bookshop. Or Mackey -- no, I lied, not Mackey, remember that jinx he put on me after I insulted his aunt? I spent all Tuesday tacking on 'god save the queen' to the end of every sentence. Oh, I'm sorry, am I boring you?" this last is said to the wand, which hiccuped out temperamental sparks as he rocked forward in his chair.
He leans in again, touching the tip of his own wand to the spot where the soft white inner wood of the rowan is exposed, pale as parchment. A long series of numbers burn their way across the surface, punctuated by carefully-drawn runes, before fading away; the 7s, the most magically powerful, are the last to be absorbed. The rowan seems to hum with it.
"Is that better?" Mark asks, rolling his eyes some.
There's a noise from behind him, footsteps, and then fingers go carding through his hair, nails scraping against the nape of his neck in greeting.
Eduardo darkens his peripheral vision, saying, "I love how you're always talking to your wands as if they're cognizant."
"Of course they're cognizant," Mark retorts instantly, not looking up. "Everything is. It's just, they forget sometimes, and that's what our magic is for, to help everything remember what it's like to think freely. I mean, have you met our coatrack?"
This earns him a snort. "Yeah, it tried to clock me as I came up the steps. How is it you manage to get all our household appliances to hate us?"
Mark uses his free hand to point at himself. "Face," he goes, and looks up, deliberately dimpling his smile.
Eduardo throws his head back and laughs, which is gratifying in that completely universal oh look I made someone laugh aren't I cool kind of way. He rubs his thumb along the edge of Mark's hairline and says, "I brought kebabs back."
"I know, I can hear Dustin masticating from up here." There's a pause, where they both listen to the sounds of Dustin from downstairs, and Christy's lowly audible, I have never seen anything so disgusting, stop, you're dripping grease way too close to the Calming Draughts. "Actually, I'm pretty sure they can hear him masticating in Scotland."
"Well, that's classy." Eduardo could sound a little bit more sarcastic there, but he'd have to try really hard. "We should probably look into hiring people who aren't our friends."
"I know," answers Mark matter-of-factly. "I'm thinking we'll conduct interviews or something, and then -- ow!" The wand he's working on spits out sparks again, glancing off the arch of Mark's thumb and scoring his wrist. He jerks back in his chair, sucking on the sore part of his hand as the pain recedes, swearing lowly the whole while.
"Something wrong?" Eduardo keeps his voice mild, leaning over Mark's shoulder to inspect the damage as well.
"I'm bound to make mistakes more frequently than not, is all. It's not like there's a wealth of information on wandlore, Wardo," Mark returns, giving his hand a vigorous shake as if he could dislodge the welts that way. "No matter how many Ravenclaws we sic on the library trying to find information. Most wandmakers keep things close to their chest -- as far as good old-fashioned practices go, it's even more notoriously nepotistic than most European traditions."
"You could always delay opening the shop and apprentice to Olivander for awhile."
Olivander has been, by turns, both intimidating as the most well-established British wandmaker in the area, and boyishly curious by Mark's continued presence and his theories on how people communicate with their own magic. Thusfar, Mark ignores all of Olivander's proposals to meet and discuss it.
He shakes his head, a sharp, vehement motion of his chin. "And have him take all my ideas and pass them off as his own? That's what apprenticeship means, you know, being patted on the head and being told 'good job, kid, but the adults will take it from here now.' No, no, and no, I won't do it. Olivander's wands are good, solid, strong, and he will always have loyal business, but I've got a better idea. Think, Eduardo, you can revise a spell in semantical ways, pronunciation or otherwise, and that'll affect the outcome of a spell cast, but change the wand that performs that spell, and nothing is the same. Witches and wizards grow up with their wands; therefore, you need a wand that will grow up with the wizard. I just need to figure out what I'm missing."
He twirls his own wand along his knuckles, thoughtful, but when he brings it close, a possible arithmancy theorem bright on the backs of his eyelids, the rowan's wandtip glows red in warning. Mark scowls.
Eduardo straightens, glancing around. "You should probably wear goggles or gloves, Mark," he goes.
"It won't hurt me," Mark says, and when Eduardo lifts an eyebrow, gaze dropping to Mark's hand, he amends, "Not seriously, at any rate, I'm not stupid. Besides, I like to be able to see and feel what I'm doing."
"Still. Maybe that's your problem: too much contamination from the outside world getting into this room."
"I'm aware of that, Wardo. I attempted to work around that at first, because why shouldn't a wand be exposed to the world it's going to be working in, but all I got was a wand with a propensity for spitting dust with every spell it cast, and another one that liked to hum that bizarre advertisement jingle Dustin is so fond of. So now I've got a barrier for sterility's sake," he flicks his wand over his shoulder; the air between the doorframe shimmers briefly, iridescent like a soap bubble.
Eduardo blinks. "But I got in just fine."
"Yes, you did," Mark says, pointed, and then an idea strikes him. "Hey, sit down a minute, would you?"
The chair isn't nearly big enough for that; neither of them are eleven anymore, and it isn't like the Tolkien-esque enormous armchairs of the Hufflepuff common room, or even the slim, high-backed, almost aerodynamic ones found in Slytherin. Mark scoots over so Eduardo can sit, both of them trying to balance with only one thigh each on the wooden seat.
"I need your wand," Mark prompts, and Eduardo draws it without question.
It, too, is rowan wood, as slender and thin as an extension of Eduardo's own fingers. His is the first wand Mark ever made, an endeavor that was half skill and half desperation and a lot of hours working in the dark. He had nothing on him at the time -- none of the dragon heartstring, phoenix feather, or unicorn hair that Olivander favors so much -- so Eduardo's wand has no core. Instead, Mark had slit his own palm, and then Eduardo's, and used the blood combined to stain the white wood: he'd waffled about it (which was odd for him, because Mark's never been a waffler in his entire life,) pacing back and forth in Eduardo's bedroom, because blood magic is crude, medieval, and very easy to misuse. Most textbooks warn against it.
However, it isn't inherently Dark, like most people think; indeed, when willingly given, there's nothing even remotely as powerful as blood -- why else would there be such stink about its purity, why else would the sacrifice of Harry Potter's mother cast such strong protective magic over him? Even now, poised between Eduardo's fingers, the wand almost hums with proximity, like it recognizes their combined heartbeat.
And although he hasn't ever used blood as an ingredient again, he doesn't regret it. He'd been there, after all, standing right there when Eduardo's father snapped the old wand in two. He'll never forget that noise, he thinks, that sharp crack -- it'd been as if Mr. Saverin had crossed the room and broken Eduardo's own spine.
He leans over, tilting his head some so that it fit into the space between Eduardo's shoulder and face, lifting his mouth to whisper in his ear, bottom lip brushing against the lobe.
Eduardo shoots a look at him, surprised, his face close enough that his features blur. "Really?" he inquires, and at Mark's nod, seems to shrug mentally in that familiar, it's Mark Zuckerberg, what are you doing to do way and goes, "All right, then."
He touches the tip of his wand to the exposed part of the rowan wood, right where Mark had been conjuring earlier. The wand doesn't spit sparks this time, and Eduardo takes a moment to concentrate; the same moment Mark uses to be bizarrely, overwhelmingly grateful that Eduardo is even here. Eduardo, who could have been playing Keeper with Puddlemere (he'd been offered, coming straight from his NEWTs, because Oliver Wood was going on a publicity tour and they didn't have anyone on reserve,) or working for his father's acquisitorial branch of Gringotts overseas, or even going off with Christy for that dragon's blood thing she was so curious about last year, but instead, he's here, in a cramped flat above a wandshop in Diagon Alley, with Mark, and keeps on smiling like it's the only place he can imagine himself being.
Eduardo murmurs, soft; the rowan wand glows for a moment, wood stained red then green, and then subsides.
Nothing else happens, and Eduardo side-eyes Mark in a curious manner. "Are you doing to tell me what that was for?" he asks.
"No," says Mark, because the point wasn't the spell he cast, but rather that the rowan wand be exposed to his magic, because that's the whole reason for it, isn't it. Mark's blood is now a part of Eduardo's magic; they are one and the same, Mark's magic and Eduardo's magic, two parts of the same whole, and Eduardo probably can't see it because he doesn't look at magic the same way, the strings of numbers and code and the building blocks they make, but he gave his blood to the creation of his own wand because Mark asked him to. He didn't need another reason.
And that's just as important as the blood itself. It wouldn't have worked, he thinks, if it had been anyone else.
Mark's wands will grow with their users, made more of math than myth, and what a witch or wizard puts into their wand is exactly what they will get out of it. Rowan wood learns and absorbs the fastest, and now this one has been taught what love looks like.
"Come on," he says, standing abruptly and snagging Eduardo's collar, tugging on it pointedly. "Kebabs, I'm hungry."
Eduardo stands too, and catches at Mark's arm as he lowers it, using it to pull him in close. The kiss lands a little bit off-center, which is annoying, because they've been kissing with regularity bordering on the infatuated since they were fifteen, you'd think they'd have gotten the hang of this by now.
He shifts his weight onto the balls of his feet, searchingly covering Eduardo's mouth with his own, and they sway there for a moment, holding on to each other, mouths working in familiar push and pull. A little flat in Diagon Alley, his own wandshop, and later Eduardo will pull the covers up over their heads like they're schoolchildren again, kissing his mouth and teeth and nose and cheeks because they can be as ridiculous as they like, it's just them in the warmth and the dark, and Mark will be so stupidly drunk on it all, though he'll never be able to tell if it's because of his success or because of Eduardo.
"You know," and that's Eduardo chuckling, their faces still held close together. "It's going to be a little odd later, I think, when you're famous and I'll just be this boy that you know."
"Don't be ridiculous," says Mark, ever-impatient. "There's no way I would have succeeded if you hadn't been by my side since I first asked for your help, you know that. Honestly. Now, we should get food," he steps back, towards the door. "Before Dustin eats all of it, gets sick, drinks Pepper-up Potion, and then proposes marriage to Christy."
"Again?"
"Yeah."
And down the stairs they go, past the temperamental coatrack and the unopened boxes, Mark in front and Eduardo following, same as they always have.
-
fin