credit to nat of adoxography.


Fun fact: The cactus thing happened to me. 

Richard's frantic scribbling was interrupted by several knocks and the creak of the door. He glanced up briefly and saw none other than his newly self-proclaimed friend Astrid, looking like she didn't have a care in the world. Sometimes the Auror wished he was capable of having that kind of attitude towards the world, but he reckoned that it could cost him a lot. Say, if anyone from his past suddenly turned out to be alive AND holding a grudge on him, and he wouldn't move a muscle about it? Hello, Azkaban. 

But tonight wasn't for reminiscing, was it? He quickly rolled up the scroll in front of him, tucking it away in a drawer, and greeted Astrid, who was already waltzing around like she was at home, with a nod. 

"Yeah, carpentering is a hobby of mine," he answered, resting his elbows on the table and wrapping his left hand over his right, trying to hide the dark wood out of sight -- though it was probably far too late to try to hide the glaring difference of his limbs. What he found peculiar was that Astrid hadn't mentioned it even once -- and most people began their relentless questioning as soon as they caught sight of his wand hand. Was she oblivious? Or...?

He nodded to her remark. The room was, to put it lightly, a bloody mess. He hadn't bothered to clean it up for days, even though all it demanded was a few flicks of the wand. 

"Guess you're right." He said, grabbing his wand from the pile of papers on the table. Soon enough the empty boxes had been stacked all in one, with the empty booze bottles settling in the top one with a loud cacophony, and the place started to look somewhat civilized. Meanwhile Astrid kept cheerfully chirping away about room decoration.

The mention of succulents made Richard break a smile as he recalled an episode of his adventures. "As long as it doesn't have needles, I lodged my fist in a cactus once. It was a...Experience."

"Same old, same old. Bureaucratic bullshit 'till the end of time, " he grumbled, "If not for my nieces, I'd never have... Nevermind. What about you?"

credit to nat of adoxography.

Laying down carpets. The corners of Richard's mouth twitched, forming a brief smile -- children often came up with the wildest ideas. Though he agreed with Astrid -- there was no way he'd ever want to take care of a child, no matter how old. A little lamb? Maybe. But not a human child. Too stubborn. Too unpredictable. Too many variables to consider, too many things that could go wrong.

"Plants don't cause trouble. Which is more than I can say for my nieces," he grumbled, letting a hand through his red hair. In all fairness, it was only Mia-Rose who liked to prance around the Forbidden Forest, but perhaps the other two were more subtle about their wrong-doings than the middle sister. Richard didn't look forward to finding out what kind of stupid shit they did in their spare time, there wasn't enough space in his lungs for all the tired sighs he expected their adventures to elicit from him.

It was futile to hide who his nieces were -- they looked so much like Richard, even the dimmest of dunces could tell they were related. "Linwoods. Hard to miss, all red hair. The youngest is 12 or 13, I don't know, the middle is 15 and the eldest turned 17 this year," he stated. "Don't know what you teach, but if any of them are in your classes... I'm sorry."

credit to nat of adoxography.

Free spirit? In Richard's mind, that equaled with troublemaker and at the current stage of his life, troublemakers weren't the kind of people he wanted to deal with, children or adults. Maybe he should have picked a different profession.

But he had once been young too, hadn't he? He doubted anyone would have called him a free spirit though...Devil's spawn? Agent of chaos? Something else in the same vein was probably in his mother's vocabulary to this day.

"I didn't get detention in my day, but that's just because nobody caught me, " he said, "But at home? That's a different story." He tried to laugh about it, create the image of someone who'd just been a rambunctious youth and a headache for his parents. The truth was a lot more complex and serious,  but Astrid didn't need to know that. Nobody did.

"My brother was always the goodie two-shoes. Golden child." There was a tinge of bitterness in his statement. It had been some twenty years ago, and now Andrew was the person he thanked for his life almost every day, but there were some grudges that never went away.

His red eyebrows went up when Astrid suggested that she had something exciting and at the same time relaxing in mind. The first thing that came to his mind that would fit that description was sex, but they'd established the first time around that Richard wasn't interested in any of that, even less so with a woman. The second thing was herbs.

"Divination? I should have guessed, " he answered. Of course, there was only one subject that could have a teacher this... Free willed. "I used to be a non-believer. But when you've traveled to such places as..." he stopped abruptly. He was oversharing once again, like his tongue had it's own mind and plans. "Well, I've seen enough to give it the benefit of doubt."

"As for my nieces...They met me for the first time in their lives this year." For several years he'd lived in the farm house basement like a ghost, avoiding the children, so he'd seen them plenty of times before they ever found out that he existed.

"Do tell what you've got in mind for the relaxation. If I have to fill another form, I might lose it."

credit to nat of adoxography.

"Right you are," he answered, "Slytherin it is. To the dismay and horror of my entire family tree. A dynasty of Gryffindors, and then I make a mess of it all." The bitterness in his voice hadn't left and he looked away from Astrid while speaking, "The only other time this has happened in the Linwood family was.... Ah, doesn't really matter, does it. Our founding father apparently had the same family situation -- him, the Golden Child, and a rowdy brother. " Not that his mother cared for any of that, but he'd didn't want to tell Astrid the truth -- that he wasn't a planned pregnancy and completely wrecked his mother's plan of getting away from the isolation of Falklands.

The conversation moved to lighter tones when Astrid started laughing once more, the sound clear and joyful, causing Richard's lip corners to twitch upward. 

"No, you don't have enough of a stick up your arse to be anything but a Divination professor." He'd heard some rumors about the current staff of the school -- some of them had terrible tempers, O'Connor was stubborn as a donkey...Then again, it had always been this way, and everyone had their own sort of birds living in their head. Including Richard.

"I'd have to see it to believe it," he added before stretching in his seat, his back cracking unpleasantly. I'm getting old.  He only nodded in agreement to Astrid's question about his nieces, not wishing to lift the topic up once more.

And then Astrid got a little pouch out of her bag. The stench that came out of it made Richard's nose scrunch up in disgust -- and he'd smelled a lot of shit in his day -- so much so that he didn't even look at the opened bag, trying to keep his nose away from it. At that moment he wished he was like Tycho Brahe, with a prosthetic nose instead of his hand.

"Merlin, that smells awful, " he said after a few moments of grimacing and reached into the pouch with his left (real) hand, taking out a small amount of the herbs inside. "I'm not much of a smoker, but I think I might finally try out the  pipe I got ages ago."

He opened one of the drawers of the desk, shoved his right hand into it and after a few moments pulled out an exquisite tobacco pipe. The handle was made of wood just as dark as Richard's right hand, and the ivory end was shaped like a roaring lion.

"I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to stuff these, but... Two heads are smarter than one?"

credit to nat of adoxography.

After a few minutes of fiddling around with Richard's pipe and the herbs, the two of them had managed to figure out how to stuff it. Astrid had been right -- whatever spice mix he was inhaling was making him relax. It wasn't long until he had a weird spike in his usually so dormant appetite.

"I'm ravenous," he said, getting up from his chair to crack open a window to let some of the smoke out before the owner of the Three Broomsticks got a whiff of the stench. Richard was sure that no innkeeper would be too keen on tolerating the smell, even if he was here by Ministry's orders.

He sat back in his chair, hunched over, holding the pipe end in his left hand. His head felt a bit cloudy and his thoughts floated from one subject to the other, until they, not unlike a bird on a branch, landed on his wooden hand. The dark wood was itching for a polish, it had for a while now. 

"Might as well," he muttered, lost in his own thoughts as he started digging through the drawers of his table, pulling out a rag and a bottle of liquid. He set the items on the desk, reached for his wand and tapped it on his right wrist.

There was a quiet 'pop' noise as the prosthetic detached from his arm, the fabric of his sweater sleeve covering up the stump underneath. The Auror took the pipe out of his mouth and poured some of the liquid onto the rag before starting to polish the wood, completely oblivious to the presence of another person in the room.

credit to nat of adoxography.

Richard was too lost in thoughts to answer to Astrid's first few quips, and took a solid ten seconds after she had sat next to him to watch his work for Richard to register that 1)Astrid was still here 2)She was right next to him 3)His hand wasn't attached. "Shit," he muttered, draping the rag over the wooden hand in a completely useless attempt to make it disappear.

He took another hit from his pipe before looking at her. There was a grin on her face. Not a grimace of disgust, or even confusion. Just grinning at him, eyes crinkled like the Auror had told her a particularly good joke. Instead, his own bushy red eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

"I thought you had noticed by now," he drawled, "I haven't had my gloves on all evening, it was full on view. And then, the time we met... I always get strange glances for wearing gloves indoors." He sighed and took the wet rag off the prosthetic, resuming to polish it, his right arm propped on the table, making him hunch over a little bit.

"This was a gift for my 35th from my brother Andrew," he explained, prying open the wooden wrist, "Just as I thought, the joints have dried out. I'll have to soak this overnight."