Stay Up Late

[Basil Stretton]

After the weekend rush, the Monday workday had always felt quieter, and Basil was always home a little earlier that night than the rest of the week. Which was not to say it was early (he was usually too fussy to leave the rest of the Three Broomsticks staff until he was satisfied everything was on schedule and under control), but it did give him a little extra time to sit up at the rickety kitchen table and go through his drafts. He had spent most of the workday on the inn's book-keeping, so his mind wasn't yet tired from the switch from numbers to words, although he had to keep rubbing his eyes from the dimness of the room, and had set his lit-up wand beside his pages, the Lumos a little extra reading light.  

He was just scratching out a few words when a door creaked open and shut, and Basil was too absorbed in his work to catch whether the footsteps had come from out of the house or simply down the stairs. Regardless, he could tell without looking that it was his son and not one of his sisters who had just joined him, and his mouth tugged in a brief smile down at his pages. "Oscar," he said in greeting, not quite able to look up from his work just yet, but also not inclined to let his son slip back off to wherever he was so soon. The holidays were the only time he actually got to see Oscar, and he liked to capitalise on that. (It helped that his son was always an ally in the house against the damned pair of harpies he called his sisters.)

"Still some leftovers from the Broomsticks, if you're hungry," Basil added, pointing with his quill over to the pot he'd brought home, as he did sometimes. Not that he minded rustling meals up himself, but the Broomsticks fare was nothing to sniff at - what had it been tonight, mutton chops and vegetables? It was perhaps a little late to eat, he thought, glancing briefly at the clock, but the summer hours always did push his appetite back, and Oscar, well; Oscar was a teenage boy.

@'Oscar Stretton'
@'Cassius Lestrange'

  

[Oscar Stretton]

Oscar sidled into his house from a day of various adventures. He nearly started at the sound of his name, but immediately relaxed once his brain processed it as Basil's voice. He really didn't want to run into his aunts - surely Angelica would somehow be able to tell that he drank one beer three hours ago. 

He was also concerned that Da would be able to tell, but that was much less of a threat than Angelica was. Da would get it, probably.

"Da," he said, "Oh, Merlin - Mutton?" Oscar grinned genuinely. Mutton was one of his favorites - (he was a fifteen year old boy, and everything was his favorite) - and traipsed over to the bowl to grab a large plate.

He practically bounced from the pot over to his father, bowl in hand, and perched across from him at the kitchen table. "How's the writing?"

  

[Basil Stretton]

Not that he had been in a bad mood to start with - weary, perhaps, yes - but the mere presence of his son lifted his spirits a little, saw him sit up a little straighter. He wasn't hungry anymore himself, but Oscar's enthusiasm and the smell of the leftovers as it wafted over to the table were enough to second-guess himself. No, no, he wasn't hungry. Instead he tapped his wand on the rim of the cup before him, refilling it with water.

"I'll have something for you in a few minutes, I think," Basil replied with a half-smile, riffling the sheets in front of him as a sign to show he was nearly finished with a chapter. He'd already planned this instalment - with his son's input here and there - weeks ago, but he was finally finished churning out it in full prose; it just needed one more once over before he owled it off to the printer. What was to happen in the last third of this knutcracker in the series (about the rogue cursebreaker, again), on the other hand, was anyone's guess, and it had been needling at Basil a while, and was where a fresh perspective might come in handy.  

Amidst crossing the last few t's and dotting his i's, Basil paused with the quill a few inches away from the paper to pose a congenial question in return. "How're the boys?" He hadn't any idea what his son had been up to today, but he presumed Oscar was spending his summer hanging with his usual crowd of friends.

  

[Oscar Stretton]

"Excellent," Oscar said cheerfully. Like his mother, he was told, he had a soft-spot for penny dreadfuls even if they were arguably the lowest form of literature. Like his father, he recognized their money-making properties. These things combined to make him a very committed editor of his father's work, and he was excited to see how this knutcracker series ended.

"They're good," Oscar said, "I walked over to Gabe's place earlier today." Gabe lived in Pennyworth, and Oscar was quite impressed by the shiny new neighborhood even if its construction had been somewhat of a shitshow. Maybe when he was a healer they could move there - as long as he got the required O.W.L. and N.E.W.T. scores.

"I think Hudson might stage a protest about the half-breeds, though," Oscar added belatedly, with a rolling shrug of his shoulders. He didn't Get the issues either way, but then he didn't get most of what Hudson yelled about. Karl Marx, and all that.

  

[Basil Stretton]

"Oh?" Basil asked, mostly to show he was still listening to Oscar as the boy mentioned which friend's house he had been at, because his eyes had dropped back to his papers. Gabe - the Vance boy, then; one of the families from this area who had moved to Pennyworth.

And Hudson was one of the Pines, Basil knew that. He was nevertheless surprised to hear about the thought of a protest, and his quill paused in its scratching again.

"He's... he's not half-human though, is he?" Basil asked, wondering if he had been paying enough attention to the kids his son was friends with. Though he did not feel outward revulsion at living in the same society as most part-humans - a good proportion of them seemed to try not to cause trouble, despite what they were - Basil did feel an instinctive dread at the thought of his son getting too mixed up with the whole halfbreed mess. His mouth only tightened into a frown at his next thought, which may prove a rather more unfair consequence of the new rules. "Or is he having trouble with his records?" How many students would be cast out because of it, projected roughly back into the Slums without the prospects they deserved?

  

[Oscar Stretton]

Oscar shook his head fervently. "No," he said, "He just - likes protesting, I guess." He knew there was a not-insignificant chance that he'd end up going with Hudson and the boys to a protest, but didn't really have interest in it.

"Jamie has to ask the Japanese government for his mum's records, though," Oscar added as a bit of an afterthought, "So I hope that's no trouble." 

Oscar knew he was lucky. His paternal grandparents were alive and easy to find, and his maternal ones were muggles.

  

[Basil Stretton]

No, Hudson Pine just liked to be loud and angry about things, what a surprise. Basil heaved a sigh, a little in relief, a little in exasperation, and with concern about one of Oscar's other friends. The whole thing was worrying, this retrieval of records. It almost wouldn't sound out of place, maybe a few years back, to hear of getting records to prove blood purity, never mind humanness. No, but that was some kind of dystopia - they weren't there yet. Thankfully, Merlin.

"Mmm," Basil agreed with Oscar's sentiments of hope there. That said - "But I don't want you letting Hudson get you all mixed up in these protests," he warned: he knew Oscar was smart - he prided himself on that - but if Pine and the other boys around here dragged him along and they got branded troublemakers, it wouldn't look good for any of them. And Basil would be damned if Oscar didn't finish his seventh year with a handful of NEWTs to boot.  

"If the board of governors get a whiff of which students are causing trouble - even outside the gates - I wouldn't be surprised if, next thing you know, it's on your records -" He trailed off with a bit of a grimace, waving the feather of his quill in demonstration. He hadn't meant to lecture. But it wouldn't look good. And the school headmaster, what was the last good anyone had heard of him? Basil had personally heard less-than-flattering things about the man from his own school staff, from their times 'chaperoning' the students on Hogsmeade weekends.

  

[Oscar Stretton]

Even as he nodded in agreement with his father, Oscar knew that probably he was going to end up dragged to a protest. Because probably Hudson is going to go to a protest, and if Hudson goes to a protest then probably Oscar will too, because that's what friends do. Of all the things he did that could get him in trouble, a protest was probably one of the worse options - because his dad had explicitly told him not to.

"I'll try not to, Da," Oscar said, although he already knew it was a half-assed promise and his voice was not very committed. It was just hard to think of his records as mattering, in the long run.

  

[Basil Stretton]

"Hmmm," he said, scrutinising his boy without being much convinced. Really, trying not to was no such promise. The words just keep your head down rolled about his throat a bit, but they sank back down without him saying them aloud. Clever as Oscar was, he had perhaps too much of his mother in him to be able to follow that to the letter, and Basil wasn't sure how well he could truly begrudge him that.

"Yes, you do that," he instructed, holding his stare a moment longer, and then snapping back down to fiddle with one sentence in the chapter and then toss his quill down with a sigh of relief. Lecturing about not getting into trouble was one thing, but the hero of this penny dreadful had evidently never seen the benefit of it: the ridiculous cursebreaking rogue of his always did wade into seas more of trouble before he could climb out of it again. "Enjoy," Basil added, sliding the papers along to his son to read through at his leisure and rolling his eyes at how terribly easy trouble was to write.

  

[Oscar Stretton]

Oscar shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He hadn't technically lied to his father but had the sense that he was lying nonetheless; he knew, after all, that a protest was nigh-inevitable. But as long as he didn't get into too much trouble - arrested, or anything like that - then it would probably be fine. Probably.

The knutcracker in front of him was a relief; Oscar brandished the pages at his father. "Thanks," he said, "I should have edits back for you in two or three days."