Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ronan was walking down Bray’s Main Street, thinking idly of stopping somewhere for a bite to eat, when two figures he recognized left a shop not five yards ahead of him and stopped.

“Snow,” Nita said softly, tipping her head back and letting the flakes land on her face. Kit stretched out a hand and caught a particularly fat flake.

“You wait,” said Ronan, drawing level with them. “It’ll probably rain in the night and wash it all away before morning.”

Nita shook her head. Neither she nor Kit looked at all surprised to see him. “It wouldn’t kill you to be optimistic, would it?”

“You never know,” said Ronan. “In our line of work…”

They all laughed, like it was a joke. And it was, but the kind of joke the Amadaun favoured: the true kind.

“Where are you headed?" Kit asked.

Ronan shrugged. “Nowhere in particular.”

“We were just on our way home,” Nita said. “Do you want to come along?”

“Home,” Ronan repeated. “To New York?”

Kit took his hand, then looked up and met Ronan’s surprised expression with a serious one. “Broadway is waiting for you,” he said.

“Oh, feck off!” said Ronan, pulling his hand away quickly while Kit laughed. “D’you know how many times I’ve heard that song already this year? Too bleeding many. Christmas is finally over, I thought I was safe.”

“Not a fan of the Pogues?” Kit asked wryly.

“I'm not a fan of anything overplayed,” said Ronan.

“I guess they’re not obscure enough for his hipster sensibilities,” Nita stage-whispered.

Ronan turned to her. “I am not,” he said, pointing a finger at her, “a hipster.”

Nita’s mouth twisted and she looked at him with the air of one attempting to figure out exactly what it was about a piece of art that made it worthy of being in a museum.

“No,” she finally agreed. “But only barely.”

Ronan took a breath, and then looked at Kit. “There’s no point arguing with her, is there?”

Kit shook his head. “Thought you knew that.”

“I thought she might have mellowed in her old age,” Ronan said, then grunted when Nita punched him in the arm. “Clearly I was wrong.”

“We’re still teenagers, thank you very much,” Nita said. “You’re the one who’s in his twenties and done with school.”

Ronan considered pointing out the fact that they were both also legally adults, but he quickly thought better of it.

“Oh, that’s right,” Kit said. “You’re finished. How does it feel?”

“Strange,” said Ronan. He took a breath, as though he had something else to say, but then he realised that… no, that was it, really. “Very strange,” he murmured.

Kit responded to this with the thoughtful nod of one who won't truly be able to understand what they've just been told for a while yet. “So, what are you doing in Bray? We thought you were living in Limerick now.”

Ronan nodded. “I am. But I’m trying to track down a piece of equipment one of the wizards in my catchment area needs. It’s rarer than rare, but the Knowledge was pretty clear I needed to be here.”

“So you could run into us?” Nita suggested, grinning. Ronan tilted his head and looked at them thoughtfully.

“Could be. There are no coincidences, after all. What are you two up to, then?”

“My Aunt’s having a party for her employees and their family and friends. And her family and friends,” Nita said. “We came here looking for these special fancy olives Carmela insisted were necessary for a party.”

“And we finally found them,” Kit said, patting the strap of his backpack. “So we’re on our way back to Ballyvolan now. Want to come with us?”

Ronan considered it. On the one hand, he was on errantry. On the other hand, the Knowledge didn’t object. On the contrary, it seemed to think a party was just the thing he needed.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

*

When they got off the bus, the snow was sticking. Kit whooped and ran up the hill, and Nita and Ronan chuckled as they scrambled up after him.

As they drew nearer to Annie Callahan’s property they started to hear first a faint bass line, then what was recognizable as a melody. As they came over a hill the field being used for the party finally came into view.

There was an enormous tent set up, white roof blending into the snowy hills behind it, open on all sides but one, where a girl with short red hair was standing on stage behind a laptop and a number of speakers. Most of the people present were dancing in the warm orange light, but some were standing or sitting near a buffet table as they enjoyed food and hot drinks.

“Come on,” Kit said. “Let’s give Carmela her olives, she's been texting me about them since we left the house this morning."

They walked through the snow around the tent (stopping briefly at the buffet table to grab a few… Ronan thought they might be quiches, or some variation thereupon), then on to the house.

In the kitchen they found Annie Callahan, who appeared to be attempting to talk her ancient (and very cranky) toaster into releasing a piece of toast. Judging by the faint smell of smoke, she wasn’t having much success. Mrs Smyth was chuckling as she opened a window.

“Hey Aunt Annie, Doris,” Nita said as she entered the room, Kit and Ronan on her heels. “Look who we found in Bray.”

The two women looked up, then hurried over excitedly. Kit sidled past them and began talking to the toaster.

“Ronan Nolan!” Annie exclaimed. “Your mother's living in Cork now, isn't she? What are you doing in our neck of the woods?”

“I’m on errantry," he said, "and I greet you both.”

There was a popping noise as the toaster sullenly gave up a blackened piece of what had once been bread.

“Anything we can help you with?” Mrs Smyth asked, and hearing her voice, while decidedly pleasant, filled him with a strong sense of mourning. He didn’t live in County Wicklow anymore, and Mrs Smyth was no longer his Advisory. He was an Advisory himself these days, which was the weirdest thing of all, both because it felt even stranger than being done his degree, like an even more unlikely event, and because it also felt like he was perfectly at home in the position. It felt as though patiently mentoring other wizards was what he was always meant to do, which, when he looks back on his own history and thinks about the way he felt about people who needed help or who thought they were helping others… makes no sense at all. And yet here he was, loving it.

Ronan shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m only here looking for a…”

The instrument he was looking for was highly specialized, and did not have a name in English, so Ronan gave them the shorthand Speech name instead. Annie and Mrs Smyth clucked.

“Those are rare,” said Mrs Smyth.

“I know,” Ronan sighed. “But the Knowledge says this is the place to be right now, so…”

“Well, make yourself at home,” said Annie.

“Aunt Annie, have you seen Carmela?” Nita asked.

“Not for a good twenty minutes now,” said Annie. “You should probably ask Dairine.”

“She looked a bit busy,” Kit said.

“'Looked' is the operative word, I think,” Annie said, winking.

They went outside again and this time entered the tent near the stage. Nita motioned to Dairine, who appeared to murmur something to the computer before coming over to sit on the edge of the stage.

“What’s up?” she said. “Hey Ronan.”

Ronan nodded to her. “Hello Dairine.” Dairine had to be about seventeen by now, and was no longer anywhere near powerful enough to do any of the truly terrifying things she had been capable of doing as a child, but Ronan still felt a bit uneasy around her. Although truthfully, perhaps the biggest reason for that was her perspicacity, which he was sure had only increased in the years since he first met her.

“Dair, where’s Mela?” Nita asked.

Dairine wrinkled her nose a bit and looked past them to a point some fifteen yards away. They turned, but there was a wall of people obstructing their view.

“She’s dancing with Derval,” she said. “She’ll be over as soon as this song ends, though, I think she wants to show me something. If her attempts to pull me off the stage while chanting ‘come see!’ are anything to go by. Why do you want her?”

“We’ve got her olives,” said Kit,.

Dairine nodded as the song ended, and within a minute a sweaty Carmela parted the wall of people as though it were curtains and joined them, smiling brilliantly at Dairine. “Ready?” she asked, as the next song began.

“Okay,” Dairine sighed. “Let’s see what’s so amazing.” She hopped down from the stage.

“Is Spot gonna be okay on his own?” Nita asked. Dairine cast her a longsuffering look as she let Carmela lead her out of the tent with Kit, Nita and Ronan trailing behind.

“He’ll be fine. This is his gig, really. And his taste in music is actually pretty good.”

They walked around to the front of the house where, right by the road, was something that closely resembled the mental image Ronan had of Lot’s wife following her transformation into a pillar of salt.

“There,” Carmela said, stopping in front of the figure and pulling Dairine in to stand beside her, in what was presumably the best spot from which to view it. “Behold my masterpiece.”

They all looked at it.

“What—” Ronan started to say, but Dairine was already saying, “You made a snow sculpture of No-Face?”

Carmela nodded happily. “I call it…” she paused dramatically. “Snow-Face.”

“Oh my God,” Kit said.

Dairine walked around the sculpture slowly. “This is actually really good, Mela.” Carmela beamed. “Not as good as my Snowbi-Wan Kenobi of course, but—”

“Shut uuuuup,” Carmela said, tipping her head back to cast her gaze and voice skyward in an expression of supreme exasperation. “I told you, that doesn’t count, Spot helped you.”

Dairine launched into an explanation of why it absolutely did count that Ronan couldn’t quite follow. He leaned in close to Kit and Nita and whispered, “What is it supposed to be, exactly?”

“I think it’s a character from a Miyazaki movie,” Nita told him in an undertone while Kit cleared his throat and said, more loudly,“Doesn’t it look a bit… phallic?”

Carmela and Dairine shared a look, then simultaneously burst into laughter.

“Oh, little brother,” Carmela said when she could speak again. “Your mind would go there, wouldn't it?"

"I just meant," Kit said (and Ronan noticed that he was a bit pink, though how much of that was from the cold was difficult to determine), "that it seems a bit... incongruous."

"Spirited Away is never incongruous," Carmela said loftily. "And if you were implying what I think you were implying just then, I'd like to remind you that body parts are not intrinsically gendered. Besides, even if you want to look at it that way, it doesn’t have to be a body part, it could be construed as a giant dil—”

"Okay, thanks," Kit said loudly. "Thank you, really, but I need to go over here now before this conversation goes somewhere I'm not willing to follow." And he went to go lean against the fence about twenty-fiive yards away. Nita and Ronan stayed to admire the sculpture a bit more before going over to join him.

“I’m not a prude,” Kit said, after a moment.

“I never said you were,” said Ronan.

“No, really, I’m okay talking about sex with literally everyone but my sisters. I know I need to get over it, or at least stop giving her openings—" He winced. "But…” he shrugged helplessly.

“Is that why nobody’s mentioned that?” Ronan asked, nodding to where Dairine and Carmela were still standing in front of the snow sculpture, Dairine’s slight frame tucked up against Carmela’s side, their heads bent together, talking quietly about something.

Kit scrubbed his face and sighed. “Yeah.”

“Also they haven’t actually told anyone,” Nita said. “I don’t know if they figure we all already know, or if they honestly think it isn’t obvious to everyone.”

“But you don’t mind?” Ronan asked. He wasn’t sure which of them he was asking, but they both shook their heads.

“I don’t want to think too much about it," Kit said, "because, you know. Sister. But they seem happy.”

“And no one’s going to say anything that’ll make them unhappy about it, because Carmela’s going back to Japan in a couple of days and that'll be rough enough on them both as it is," said Nita.

“She lives in Japan now?”

Kit nodded. “Just for a year. She teaches English. Apparently she’s actually good at it too, which—”

“Is not surprising in the slightest!” Carmela called, from not as far away as she had previously seemed.

Kit spluttered.

“Go away!” he finally managed. “And stop eavesdropping!”

Carmela said something that they couldn’t quite hear, but which sounded suspiciously like “I ain't been droppin' no eaves, sir, honest.” And probably was, if Dairine’s “really?” face was anything to go by.

“Take off or we’ll keep your fancy olives hostage,” Ronan tried, going for a vaguely piratical tone of voice. Carmela’s eyes widened.

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try us!” Kit said, after casting Ronan a grateful look.

Carmela let out a long sigh and put her hands on her hips.“Oh dear,” she said. “Whatever shall I do? I suppose I’ll just have to do exactly what you tell me to—oh, wait.” She put her hand into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a jar. “Were you talking about these fancy olives?”

Kit frowned and pawed through the contents of his backpack while Dairine and Carmela linked arms and strode back around the house, cackling.

Kit sighed. “She got them. I have no idea how she got them, but she got them.” He shook his head. “And the worst part is, I’m actually surprised.”

“What about the part where she did what you told her to but it doesn’t feel anything like a victory?” Nita asked.

Kit nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that is also the worst part.”

*

Ronan and Nita made no move to go back to the tent, for what Ronan was pretty sure was Kit’s sake. The silence they fell into wasn’t uncomfortable, really, but it seemed to contain a kind of tension.

They stayed that way for some minutes, not saying anything and gazing at the sky, at the falling snow, at the hills in the distance, at the strange aura around the house caused by the giant lighted tent behind it. Then the opening notes of a new song reached their ears and Kit stepped away from the fence. If he had been a dog, Ronan was sure his ears would have pricked up.

“I love this song,” Kit said. “This is my jam.”

“Oh, you did not just say jam,” Nita muttered. “It is 2014.” Then Kit was stepping between her and Ronan and holding out a hand to each of them.

“May I have this dance?” he asked, and it was the same serious expression he wore when he was joking, but Ronan could feel a swoop of something in his stomach that he suspected was really a symptom of Kit’s actually caring about their answers. And maybe Nita felt it at exactly the same time, because they each reached out and took a hand, and Kit guided them back around the house.

*

It had been a long time since Ronan had gone dancing. He had used to go at least once a month with Majella and any of the rotating gang of mildly annoying hangers-on whose presence was affirming, if not entirely welcome, but he had fallen out of the habit when he had gone to university and been consumed by his studies. He was surprised to find, upon joining the other dancers in the tent, that he had missed it even more than he'd thought he had.

At first he danced as he usually would have, as though he were all alone in the crowd, but eventually he couldn’t help but stop and watch Kit and Nita.

It was obvious they’d been dancing together for years. Each seemed to have an innate sense of where the other was and what they were doing at any given moment, and they moved around each other with an easy grace, touching occasionally in a way that seemed almost casual. Ronan swallowed. They looked good together.

Then they seemed simultaneously to become aware of his gaze, or maybe they only noticed that he wasn’t dancing anymore, because they both reached for him and drew him into their system, and Ronan lost himself in the music and in the space between them, and this was one of those rare times he was happy to surrender.

*

Some time later (he had no sense of exactly how long it had been, or indeed exactly what had been happening), he found himself swaying to a slow song with Kit. It wasn’t a situation he had ever imagined finding himself in, but now that he was here, Kit’s arms slung loosely around his neck, and he felt strangely content.

Then he felt something brush his neck and first he thought it was Kit, but he quickly needed to re-evaluate when something wet and cold was shoved down his collar. He yelped, jumped away from Kit, and did his best to dig it out as quickly as he could, but the snow was already melting and dripping down his back. He turned and glared at Nita. Her features were schooled into a look of mild surprise, but there was still something of a smile around her eyes. Also her fingers were red and damp.

In the space of a few seconds Ronan had reached back into his memory of being fifteen, reached for his knack for being intimidating. Nita had never been intimidated by his dark looks, but that didn’t mean she had been unaffected. He pulled on his old ability to look a bit dangerous, and though it was a bit worn and faded, though he was a bit too big for it now, he knew it still looked good on him.

“Last time you pulled something like that,” Ronan said, taking a step forward, “I deserved it.” Another step forward, and he saw Nita swallow, but she didn’t move another muscle. “This time, though…” He took one more step and lowered his voice. “I reckon you’d do well to run, Miss Yank.”

They were almost nose to nose, and for a few breathless seconds they stayed that way, eyes locked. Then Ronan blinked and Nita shrieked and grabbed Kit’s hand and took off, out of the tent and across the field. Ronan gave them a few second’s head start, then tore after them, bending to scoop up a handful of snow as he ran.

*

“Well if it isn’t Rose, Jack and Nine back from their travels at last,” Dairine said when they entered the sitting room an hour later, cold and wet and exhausted, but happy. The party had wound down with surprising speed and almost everyone had gone home. She and Carmela were cuddling in an armchair and wearing identical smug expressions.

Nita frowned a bit. "I think I'm more of a Martha than a Rose, to be honest."

Dairine gave her a look. "The point, Neets," she said. "You missed it. And who said anything about you being Rose? Obviously you’re Nine, Kit’s Rose, and Ronan’s Jack.”

Nita, Kit, and Ronan looked at each other for a moment, then realised they were all okay with this, shrugged, and went to stand in front of the fire.

*

When Ronan awoke the next morning he did his best not to let out a scream. He succeeded only in reining in most of it, a strangled grunt escaping him, but considering the fact that the first thing he’d seen upon opening his eyes had been Carmela staring at him from where she was standing in front of the sofa he was sprawled upon (and had apparently spent the night on, if the crick in his neck was anything to go by), he thought he’d done quite well.

He rubbed his eyes as he waited for his heart rate to return to normal. “What is it, Carmela?” he rasped. He needed tea. Badly.

Carmela raised a box wrapped in red and gold paper and waved it around. “Merry Christmas,” she sang softly.

“Christmas isn’t for another three hundred and sixty-two days,” said Ronan. “Surely it can wait.”

Carmela’s lips quirked, and Ronan noticed she appeared to be wearing fresh makeup. And fresh clothes. While he was sprawled on a sofa in clothes he had put on more than 24 hours previously and that he was fairly certain someone was drooling on. Then he noticed he didn’t really mind (except for the part where he was awake).

“As endearing as I find your facetiousness—” Carmela said,“and believe me, it is adorable—this is actually your present from Christmas past.” Then she waggled her fingers while waving the hand that wasn’t holding the box and made a mildly enthusiastic “whoo” sort of noise, which Ronan supposed was an approximation of ghost language. “Yours is the last one I need to get rid of, so if you wouldn’t mind.” She held it out under his nose. Which was when Ronan noticed that, beneath the blanket someone had draped over them in the night, one of his arms was sandwiched between Kit’s back and the back of the sofa, while Nita was clutching the other. He attempted very gently to retrieve first one, then the other, without doing anything that might wake either of them. He was unsuccessful.

“Harpy,” he said, with all the bitterness he could muster (which wasn't much). “You can’t give it to me later?”

“Kit and I are going back to the States in a few hours to surprise our parents.”

“I notice you’re not waking him up,” Ronan said, glancing down at the top of Kit’s head.

Carmela nodded. “I’m giving him the gift of sleep,” she said. “He’s going to love it.”

“Until you wake him up to tell him you’re late?” Ronan asked.

Carmela put a hand to her bosom. “Of course not,” she said.

Ronan didn’t buy that for a second. “Harpy,” he repeated, mostly because he liked the way it sounded and he still hadn’t had any tea.

“You keep using that word,” Carmela started, and Ronan threw her a look that did absolutely nothing to stop the words “I do not think it means what you think it means” from leaving her mouth a second later.

Ronan groaned. It came out louder than he had intended, and both Kit and Nita stirred. He was free. The blanket slipped down a bit as he snatched the package from Carmela’s hand and unwrapped it. He opened the box.

Then he stared at the instrument within.

“Carmela,” he said slowly. “Where did you get this?”

She shrugged. “The Crossings. I saw it and it just screamed ‘Ronan’. Well, not literally. It was screaming something completely different at the time, but I just felt like you needed it. Do you need it?”

“Yeah,” Ronan said, quickly shaking off his surprise. There are no coincidences. “I’ve been looking for one of these. Thank you, Carmela.”

Carmela smiled, then reached out and ruffled his hair, which is something that Ronan would never have allowed under almost any other circumstances, but which, just now, seemed like something he could let slide. “You’re welcome,” she said.

Then another voice said, “Oh, look at that.” Ronan looked at Nita, who was gazing blearily in the direction of the window. “Somebody was wrong about the snow sticking around.”

“Everybody shut up,” Kit muttered. "Sleeping." And pulled the blanket back over the three of them.