Study Nightmares

[Snick]

First Floor Common Room

"You left me. It's your fault we couldn't be together. If you had behaved they would have loved you too. But you didn't and they didn't want you." James, Lex's little brother, stared up at her. He was wearing the Salem Institute uniform. At this point in time he was only eight and if he were a student at Salem he should be at least eleven, but he appeared to be only three now, the same age he had been the last time Lex had seen him. He looked ridiculous in the Pilgrim hat of the formal uniform and his voice sounded unnatural coming from such a small boy.

"I'm sorry," Lex tried to say but she was cut off. "It's your fault. You can't say sorry." Suddenly the small boy's face grew angry and menacing. He seemed to grow larger, bearing down on her. Frightened, Lex tried to run away but every time she looked back he was still there. Darkness swirled around her and then she was falling with James' face grinning horribly above her.

Lex woke with a start, jerking up from where she had put her head down on one of the study tables in the student common room. She tried to regain control of her breathing and her composure. There was a cold sweat beading on her forehead which she hastily wiped away from her now pale face. She had been trying to do her homework for Herbology when she'd put her head down next to her book and dozed off for a few minutes. She's already been losing sleep over the nightmares which had started to get bad after the Hello Dance. Now happening when I'm napping, great, Lex thought wryly. She glanced around the room, hoping no one had noticed her rather abrupt awakening.

---

"You alright, Lex?" Apparently, someone had seen her awakening, and just her luck, it was Makepeace. Things had been getting a little hard to bear in the common room, what with Pratt and Siobhan being so close and Makepeace being... Makepeace. "You look a little pale there, you coming down with a cold or something?" Because, it gave her an out if she needed one. The last thing he needed to be was another Corky.

That would be the last thing the world needed.

Makepeace didn't want to crowd Lex or be overly-solicitous of her. He hated when people were like that. Social workers were like that -- no sense of boundaries whatsoever. "How are you enjoying the school so far?"

---

"How d'you... " Oh, right, they had exchanged names at the Welcome Assembly. Or at least they had exchanged the names they wanted to people to use with them. Lex had been amused that neither of them had provided their full names, though for very different reasons. She probably wouldn't have remembered Makepeace's name at all had it not been so memorable. "Yeah, um, that must be it," Lex said in response to his question about a cold. She was uncharacteristically distracted as she tried to regain composure. She rubber her eyes with her palms for a moment as he asked his next question.

"It's good. Pretty damn weird and definitely the last few weeks have been a lot more eventful than other schools I've been to." Considering all that had happened it was a bit harder to answer that question than usual. Sure, she was enjoying aspects of the school, but there was also the little problem of a student having been kidnapped. She had already had a few ups and downs. Spending time with Katrien and Iris had been good but her fight with Christopher hadn't. She immensely enjoyed some of her classes while others were a struggle.

"Shouldn't you be up in your tower or whatever? I thought the dormitories were only for those not worthy of legacies," she said a bit crassly. Her opinion about the legacies was not very high. Already, people were starting to suck up to the legacy heads in an attempt to get picked in the coming weeks. Though the legacies were far nicer than the dorm rooms, Lex didn't think she'd ever want to participate.

---

"Well, normally I'm the last person to tell anyone to visit the school nurse, but if they catch you running around with the sniffles, they'll send you there for some Pepperup Potion." He said with a slight shrug. Part of him was tempted to reach over and press his hand to her forehead like his mother used to when he was a child, but he got the impression that she'd probably be suspicious of the gesture. "It's actually not bad. Like really powerful Red Hots or Big Red gum." And it cured the common cold, saving the drinker days of misery.

"I'd tell you that things are usually not so eventful, but there's always stuff going on. Just usually not the sort of stuff that ends up with people being kidnapped and all." It was an unprecedented event in the school's history, and Makepeace wanted to reassure Lex that the school was safe, but the Lighthouse's warning was pretty specific. Something wicked was coming, whether to the school or the country at large was impossible to say, but he didn't feel like lying to the girl. Adults already did enough of that to kids. It'll all be alright, it won't hurt, Santa will bring you presents, blah blah.

"The lighthouse?" he asked with a smirk. "Yeah, I could hang out there, but there's, like, nothing to do there." Well, he could probably watch Siobhan and Pratt make out, if they were actually to that point yet, but he didn't think they'd appreciate it. "I could have belonged to a few of the legacies here, but they found out my parents were married."

---

"Thanks. Well, if I start to feel too sick I'll go over and get a Pepperup Potion. I'm not afraid of doctors or anything," she added in case that was what he was insinuating with his reassurance. She had seen a couple students walking around with steam coming out of their ears, but other than that strange side effect, Pepperup Potions seemed like nothing but good. She didn't really think she was coming down with a cold, anyway. She was tired and stressed, but she hadn't gotten sick yet. In all honestly, a calming drought or sleeping drought would probably be the best thing for her, but that would require an explanation as to why she needed it. She may not have been afraid of doctors, but she didn't want to get sent to the councilor.

She supposed it might have been obvious that there was nothing to do in a lighthouse, especially when there were only three other people there. Lex had liked to imagine, though, that the inside of the lighthouse was far more interesting than the outside would suggest. "Your parents? What? How's that have anything to do with it?" Lex asked, completely failing to see any significance. She remembered that Makepeace's mother had died. It was the kind of thing she automatically tucked away for future reference. Knowing the background of kids sometimes came in useful later. He hadn't said anything about his father though.

---

"Okay." He said regarding her health. He doubted she really was sick, of course, but if she didn't want to talk about it, then he wasn't going to give her the third degree. Then he chuckled softly. "My parents were married, I'm not a bastard... Half of the legacies wouldn't want me."

"Seriously, though, I gave the Legacy thing a whirl when I was in third year. If you're the kid or relative of a former member, it's pretty much an almost instant in, but I'm not. And if you're not, they'll haze you. Not as bad as frats at muggle colleges will, but they'll still mess with you." He smirked a little as he said it, since most of the pain from the incident had long passed. "One of the guys who was hazing me pushed me too far and I nearly beat the crap out of him. After that, none of them would have me. Bad attitude. They felt totally entitled to treat people like shit and make them suck up in order to let them have the great honor of being their flunkies." He cleared his throat, then, realizing he was generalizing. "Not all people are like that, of course. I have a few friends in the legacies, but their besties are usually in the same houses."

---

Lex was now feeling better. Talking about other things was taking her mind off the nightmare. She didn't realize that Makepeace was perfectly aware that she wasn't sick, but even if she had known, she wouldn't have offered anything up easily. She didn't want to talk about it and she didn't want to hear anything he had to say about it. The bastard comment caused a look of indignation to flickered across her face. Her parents weren't married. She was, by definition, a bastard. She decided not to say anything about it. Makepeace hadn't directed it at her. It wasn't as if it was anything she hadn't heard before and it wasn't worth it to say anything.

He went on to talk about the hazing that the legacies put some of the students through. To Lex, it was just another reason not to want to join. She was surprised to hear that Makepeace had physically fought with someone. He didn't strike her as the kind of person who would resort to physical violence. "You're not from some old wizarding family?" She asked. The way he dressed suggested that he at least came from money. Lex had imagined that he must be one of those pureblood types, the kind that Beta Tau Phi would want.

"Esther seemed nice," she said in response to his slight backtrack. "That legacy sounds kinda ridiculous to me, though. Not exactly practicing what they preach, are they? Doubt they'd want me anywhere near that place, anyway." She hadn't even wanted to go inside when Esther had offered. Even the house had seemed uninviting to her, but that was surely her imagination.

---

Makepeace took the flicker of expression in stride, making no comment about it. It filled in a piece of a puzzle, but only a small piece. "Old wizarding family? Nah. My mother was, but she was disowned for marrying a muggle. Don't let the way I dress fool you, when I'm not here, I live in foster care." He intimated. Even though he kept that sort of thing secret from most people, he didn't figure Lex would go around telling anyone. "My parents' insurance settlement and the card game I invented last year pays for these." He said, tugging at the lapels of his blazer.

He nibbled on his lower lip a little as Lex brought up Esther and BTP. "Esther is nice. She's one of the kindest people you're likely to meet. But I agree, I wouldn't touch her legacy with a ten foot pole. I think if she was born into any other family than her own, she would probably have been a Hippie or a Brain."

---

To her own annoyance, her surprise at Makepeace's declaration that he lived in foster care showed clearly on her face. It was not at all what she was expecting him to say. When the look of astonishment faded from her face she narrowed her eyes as if she thought he might be lying and regarded him carefully. "So, both your parents are dead than?" One could not employ 'tactful' to describe Lex. She remembered that he had said his mother was dead and this new information strongly implied that his father was as well. "And do you actually wear that stuff while in care?" She added, her eyes sweeping over his getup. If he said he did than she could be sure that he was completely full of it.

Lex wasn't sure what to make of this new information, if it were even true. She supposed she should be glad that there was someone else here who understood what she was going through and had the same experiences as her, yet she couldn't help but think, as so many her age do, that no one could possibly understand. The fact that Lex had so seldom had anyone to confide in only made this universal feeling even stronger. She wondered why he had told her that in the first place.

"Card game?" With this new information, Lex found that she didn't have much interest in discussing the legacies any longer. Makepeace's mention of the invention of a card game, though, needed an explanation. The combination of the foster care and the supposed invention of a game sounded as though he was simply spinning lies. Maybe Lorccan had blabbed to other students that Lex was in foster care and Makepeace was justing yanking her around for fun. Maybe Makepeace wasn't the soft spoken proper figure he appeared to be.

---

"Yeah, car accident when I was eight." Makepeace explained with a shrug. "And no, I dress casually when in the group home. Jeans, t-shirts; stuff that I get at thrift stores. If I dressed like this in the homes, I'd get my ass kicked on a daily basis." He added with a smirk. Some of the homes he had been in had been semi-decent, but kids in the system had very little to lose, and if they thought you had more, they'd put more of an effort into making sure that you paid your dues right quick.

He reached into an inner pocket of his blazer and pulled out one of his decks of cards. "I call it Muggle - The Blathering. Got the idea off of a card game that muggles play called 'Magic - The Gathering.' Worked most of last year on it, because lots of the games magical people play are kinda retarded." He said with a smirk. Exploding snap, fanged frisbees, gobstones... Sure, Wizard's Chess was pretty good, if you had the patience and inclination (or prodigious amounts of acne) to play it, but Makepeace liked games that were a little more interesting, and didn't involve getting chewing tobacco spat in his eyes or the possibility of losing a finger or two.

[Snick]

Lex took the cards from Makepeace and started glancing through them. "Real live orphan, than, huh?" Lex said, not looking up from the cards. There was now a slight edge and strain to her voice when she spoke. "Don't see many in the system." She had always been resentful of the few orphans she had run into in foster care, maybe even jealous. There was something romanticized about orphans with so many heroes in stories and movies beginning as orphans. When people looked to adopt, orphans were appealing because they had no ties, no one to go looking for or to come looking for them. There was the possibility that orphans didn't come from a bad home, they were just unlucky. When other children made fun of them about being in foster care they had that silencing proclamation.

Lex, on the other hand, was exactly what people didn't want. An abusive family who was still hanging around on the outskirts who she might seek out or who might try to contact her. When cruel children accused her of being abandoned and unwanted she had no response, no biting comeback because it was the truth. If they were lucky, orphans would inherit whatever their parents had had, which Makepeace clearly had. Kids whose parents no longer had any parental rights had nothing. Lex knew perfectly well what happened to most kids who aged out of the system and she was not looking forward to it. Part of why she had been so ecstatic about coming to Salem was that now she might have a far better chance of not immediately becoming nothing when she graduated. It hadn't leveled the playing field, no, but now she didn't have a giant, gaping crevasse in the middle of hers.

"Eight, though. That's a bit tricky. Kinda borderline, huh?" She said, glancing up from the cards for half a moment to check his face. "Not quite young enough that there'd be clambering to adopt that age." Lex was perfectly aware that she still hadn't explicitly said that she too was in foster care, though her speech heavily implied it. She wasn't exactly trying to be cryptic, though she was still wary of the older boy, but she didn't want to make the declaration at the moment.

---

"Real live." Makepeace said, his grin fading at her tone. "With a whole lot less singing than the movies would lead you to believe." He replied, adding a slight smirk to the words. He regarded her quietly for a few moments, then shrugged. "They tried bringing in a few families to see me, but people would rather have a baby they can mess up from scratch."

"So, I'm guessing you're in the system, too..." He said, looking at her. Hell, he knew for a fact that she was in the system, because Corky had already told him as much. Still, if he hadn't known, he probably would have figured out that much just from having a conversation or two with the girl. She was cagey, closed-off, stand-offish and shrewd. "What's your story, or should I ask?" Giving her an out, because he knew that some kids hated discussing their past, but remaining open and somewhat interested to see who she was as a person. Behind the years of scar tissue that built up.

---

"Yep, good deduction," she said not entirely sarcastically. She wasn't purposefully trying to be rude but she also wasn't about to congratulate him on figuring it out, it wasn't exactly something to be celebrated. When he asked about her past Lex gave a noncommittal shrug of the shoulders as if she might not answer but then after a moment started talking anyway. "My parents were assholes so me and my brother were taken away when I was six," she began. Though Lex didn't lie that didn't mean she always told the whole truth and though she was willing to talk about her background with Makepeace she wasn't prepared to go into detail about the abuse suffered at the hands of her father. It was not something she discussed readily.

"My brother's three years younger than me so he was still pretty little. Little enough that he wasn't as messed up as me." She didn't add that she had also done her best to protect him and care for him. "I got us kicked out of the first few homes we were in and then the social workers decided to split us up to give James a chance. Our mother then legally abandoned us to the system which allowed James to be adopted by some couple. I've been moving around since then. Pretty sure I've got that big ol' 'unadoptable' written across my file." She spoke in a detached voice, not letting any kind of emotion slip into her tone. What she had stated were just facts as far as she was concerned, as if they could belong to any one of the kids that were in foster care. She was still holding on to Makepeace's cards using them as a way to distract her hands and eyes. She wasn't even really reading them anymore but continued shuffling them between her hands or fanning them out.

---

"Elementary, my dear Watson." Makepeace said in a fake British accent. "If it's any consolation, I think about ninety percent of the people older than four are pretty much unadoptable, and anyone who has been in foster care long enough pretty much makes it a hundred. Not that it ever bothered me. Most of the people they brought in looking for adoptions were kinda weird. Needy." Which, to someone like Makepeace, just set off all the wrong sorts of alarms.

"That's tough." He admitted on the subject of her brother -- not a callous judgment, but a statement of empathy for her. To be split up from her brother by the system and then have him adopted out while she had to cool her heels in foster care. "Sounds like your case workers are a bunch of bastards, pardon my French. Do you ever get to see him?" Would she even know where he was? Makepeace didn't know. He was allowed to visit his grandmother once before she died, and by then, she was so demented that she mistook him for his father, and then, a year later to attend her funeral. He hadn't seen his aunt, who he presumed was still alive, since she began her missionary work in Africa.

---

Lex finally raised her eyes from the cards to look at Makepeace when he made the comment about adoption. She studied his face, trying to figure out if he was lying. So many kids said that, that they didn't care or that they didn't want to be adopted. Hell, Lex had said things like that but that didn't mean it was always true. It certainly wasn't true for Lex. She did want to be adopted. She did want a family, desperately, painfully. Maybe it was different for a kid like Makepeace, she thought, who had already had a real family. There was no resentment for Lex that she wasn't with her parents, no desire to go back. Did she wish she had been born into a normal family and had never been put into foster care? Of course she did. But she had never, not once, wanted to go back to her real mother and father. But no one had ever wanted her and she had stopped believing that anyone could. She had had good foster families, it wasn't all terrible luck, but none of them had been pre-adoption foster families and one way or another she had moved on.

"Nope," the word was slightly drawn out and it sounded as if she were answering the question to whether or not she had enjoyed a disappointing movie rather than if she ever got to see her brother. She paused for a moment, her eyes flicking away from his again. She looked out the window of the room, out onto the grounds at the students walking past. She was silent for a few moments, her jaw clenched. "He probably doesn't even remember me," this came out slightly more quietly than intended. She felt tightness in her chest as if she might cry. This was one of her other nightmares. But then the helpless feeling prompted anger and Lex turned back and tossed the cards onto the table, which scattered across the surface. "But it doesn't matter. He's better off without me. He has a family now and I can't mess it up," she said aggressively, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms, glaring past Makepeace's shoulder.

---

Makepeace whipped out his wand and waved it over the cards, summoning them to his hand, and he tucked them away in the pocket they had come from without bothering to organize them. Had he wanted to be adopted? Not really. Not by people who were desperate to be loved unconditionally. Love always came with terms and conditions, and it always had a price. It would be nice to be adopted by people who didn't have a huge hole to fill in their own lives, but what were the chances of that happening? Nil for half of his life, and very soon, he'd be out on his own, one way or another.

He saw that she was getting upset, and shrugged. "Ok." He said, accepting what she claimed. He wanted to tell her something comforting, something uplifting about how the kid would always remember her and all that, but that would all be a load of crap. He couldn't promise her that her brother hadn't forgotten her, and what could he really do to help the situation, anyways? If he did that sort of thing, she'd think he was a liar like most adults. "So, how are you on a broom?" He asked, changing the subject for both their sakes. "Feel up to snagging a couple of the school brooms and racing? They've probably still got the stadium lights on for practice."

---

Lex was expecting Makepeace to get angry at her for throwing his cards and messing them up and she was prepared to get angry back. She was surprised when he silently collected them and put them away, then calmly changed the subject. Maybe he really did deserve his name. She was actually relieved that he didn't parade out some line about how James would love her forever and of course he remembered her. She knew that he couldn't possibly know and wouldn't have appreciated it. There were far too many complex issues to be solved with a few empty words of encouragement. That fact that he had simply acknowledged it was appreciated by Lex even if she would have been hard pressed to voice those feelings to him.

It took her a moment to accept that he was really offering to go out to the field with her and slowly, almost cautiously, her expression softened. "I'm pretty good. I want to try out for the racing team next semester," she admitted. "I'm too small for Quodpot," she added as an after thought. Though she was excited to see the game played, she didn't want to play it herself. She knew already that there was no way she would be able to be a successful Quodpot player anymore than she could be a successful football player. Had there been Quidditch at the school, she probably would have made a good seeker or chaser.

She wasn't completely sure how to respond to his offer, particularly because it had taken her off guard. Her eyes dropped and she tried to put on a tone a indifference when she spoke. "Sure, I mean, if you want to. Did you not buy a broom along with your fancy clothes?" Though she wanted to go out to the pitch with Makepeace, she couldn't help but make a quick dig at him. Old habits die hard and she was reluctant to show how much she did want to go.

---

"You'd be good at it." Makepeace said on the subject of racing. "Or Aingingein, which is like racing, but you do it through hoops that are set on fire. It's just not all that popular." Like Formula One racing compared to NASCAR. Neither of which Makepeace understood well enough to use as comparisons. He was one of the few students in the school interested in Aingingein, and while he was good at it, on an amateur level, he wasn't great.

"And I'll have you know that I own two brooms." He added with a smug little smirk. "Of course, neither of them is all that great. One's a faulty knock-off out of Hong Kong and the other is a lemon that I bought second hand. I spend half of my time in Fabrications trying to fix them up." He said, fixing her with a wan look. "Mind you, I didn't know they were crap until the first day I brought them into school, and everyone looked at them and said, 'Why'd you buy that cheap piece of crap?' The answer, of course, was because they were cheap and I am living on a fixed income."

---

She smiled crookedly at Makepeace when he described Aingingein, saying she would be good at it. "That sounds pretty badass. Is it ever played here?" She had been slightly disappointed that there wasn't a larger variety of school sports. She would be trying out for baseball and then, in the Spring racing, of course, but she would have liked to have more options.

"Are they better than the school brooms?" Lex asked, well aware of the fact that the school brooms weren't very good which was always the case with school equipment. A few of the students who had had experience on brooms had loudly complained about them during flying class. There was then, of course, those who took the opportunity to brag about their own brooms. "I'm gonna assume you're letting me borrow one of yours. Don't worry, I'll just pretend they're great, I don't know any better." She decided on being forward even if she might get shot down. She hated submissively asking for things as if she never had the right to anything. She also realized that letting people have an out meant you were only giving them an opportunity to deny your request.

---

"It's played maybe once or twice a year." He told her with a quirk of his lips. "Usually around St. Patrick's day, to celebrate Irish heritage. One of the reasons I like it so much is because it's a game of maneuverability and skill, not just how fast your broom is." Because there were sharp, acceleration-chopping turns that took the speed of the broom out of the equation.

"Well, I'll go got them and show you." He said on the subject of his brooms, tapping his Keeper pin. He disappeared with a swipe of the Lighthouse's beam, and reappeared about two minutes later with a wooden case over his shoulder, which he set down on the table and opened up.

He took out one broom that had two smaller brooms on wooden booms bolted onto its sides like training wheels, and said, "This is my Numbutt 2000. It's actually a Yan 2000, a Chinese knockoff of the Nimbus. It's fine until you hit about a hundred miles per hour, and then the cushioning charm starts to buckle, and it's like riding a bike with a hard plastic seat down a flight of stairs. I've tried just about everything to fix it, but it didn't work, so I bought a couple of kids' Scooty-Brooms and bolted them on. They kinda shore up the cushioning charm so it doesn't kick my butt when I ride it." He set it down on the surface of the table and then took out the other one.

"This one used to be a Twigger 90; one of the fastest brooms on the market -- almost as fast as a Firebolt." He said, holding it up. It had an unfinished look to it, its varnish having been stripped away, and there was something that looked like a golden golf ball driven into the top of the shaft. "It's made out of Yew wood, so it's very flexible. Unfortunately, once you start hitting the high speeds, the wood begins to bend, and it begins to steer in the direction of the bend. I tried everything from fiberglass coating to a metal frame to keep it from bending, but then I started experimenting with making the wood even more flexible to increase the instability. Something I read about Muggle aeronautics -- If you increase how unstable a jet is in flight, you increase its maneuverability. Then I drilled a big hole into the head of it and stuck in a golden snitch. It's crazy-maneuverable now. Emphasis on the crazy." Riding this broom terrified Makepeace to his very core, and yet he was unable to stop tinkering with it, like his father tinkering with the Jag that ultimately ended his life. "I call it Murder Suicide."

[Snick]

Lex looked away as the bright light of the light house swept Makepeace away. It sure seemed like a nice way to travel, she thought as she swept her herbology things back into her bag. When Makepeace got back and put his brooms out on the table Lex pulled her feet up under her so that she was kneeling on her chair instead of sitting. This allowed her to lean over the table to look more closely at the brooms as Makepeace described them. She barely knew enough about brooms to know that the Firebolt was the best one but she didn't know about the Twigger. But even Lex knew that his brooms were not nice. The Numbutt, as Makepeace had called it, seemed far better than the Twigger though which sounded terrifying.

Lex couldn't help but laugh when Makepeace explained about the Scooty-brooms. They did look a bit silly. "Do the extra brooms change the steering at all?" Lex asked, thinking about how you couldn't make sharp turns on a bike with training wheels. The little brooms reminded her of training wheels though she wasn't really sure how good the analogy was with a bike. Though she was already an alright flyer, the aerodynamics of brooms was beyond her.

"What's a snitch? And why's it help?" Lex pulled the handle of the Twigger towards herself, wanting to see where he'd drilled the hole, but didn't think to bother to ask permission before grabbing at it. Now she was wondering if he really would let her try riding them and, more importantly, if she actually wanted to. The Yan 2000 sounded fine, even if it did look weird. The Twigger on the other hand, not so much.

---

"They actually improve the broom's cornering a little." He told her, hefting the broom. "I was kinda thinking about X-wings from Star Wars when I added them on." He said, since she had probably seen the movies on TV. She was a tomboy, after all. "It's a temporary fix, though. I'll probably strip off the cushioning charm altogether and re-do it when I get the chance." Which didn't look to be very soon, thanks to requesting to learn wandmaking from Woodrick. Apparently, it wasn't the world's simplest process as he had once thought.

"That is the snitch." He tapped the golden golf ball-looking thing in the head of Murder Suicide, and two delicate golden wings sprang out of it. "It's a ball from a game called Quidditch that barely anyone in America plays because its rules make no sense. In this case, its wings add a certain amount of control. Otherwise, flying it would be like playing crack the whip in midair." Which he had. In some respects, flying Murder Suicide was like watching a horror movie. It made him tense and scared him to the core, but the high afterwards kept him from swearing it off entirely.

---

"Oh, cool," Lex said in response to Makepeace's explanation about the added on little brooms. She reached out to touch it, running her hands over the broom and feeling where he had attached the training-wheel brooms to the main broom. "How cool would it be to design racing brooms? Do we ever get to do anything like that in fabrications?" Maybe, just maybe, if she ever got her own broom she could do something like Makepeace had done. Just because she didn't have a really expensive broom didn't mean she couldn't improve it. She would have to learn more about flying and learn more advanced magical skills, of course, but the thought made her smile slightly to herself.

"Playing crack the whip in midair sounds pretty awesome," she laughed impishly. Lex could be reckless, particularly in sports which made her either a great asset or dangerously unpredictable. The fact that, growing up, she had usually managed to perform some sort of accidental magic to save her hide didn't do anything to deter her recklessness.

---

"Pratt's family does that. designs and manufactures brooms. But for a student to get their hands on the secrets to enchanting a broom that does better than a Comet craphauler, though, well, good luck. Those charms are protected by copyright laws and Proprietary Claim charms that keep people from duplicating high performance brooms or other magical trinkets by just casting the reveal-a-spell on them. This is Woodrick's lecture number one, by the way. There are some guys in Israel and Africa who unscramble secret enchantments, and publish them in outlaw journals, but it's hard to get hold of one that isn't total crap."

---

"Oh," Lex couldn't keep the disappointment at this information off her face. She would never get a real broom. She didn't have money like Makepeace even if he did claim to not have very much it was still more than she had. The state was already shelling out more money than average for her just to attend Salem, they weren't about to start handing her expensive presents. It would take a lot of saving up of Christmas and birthday money before she could afford a nice broom if she was even allowed to do that. She supposed she shouldn't have been surprised at the disappointment. It was her fault for having such high expectations for Salem and for what magic could do.

"You ever get your social worker to let you take control of the allowance foster parents usually get for clothes and presents and stuff?" She asked, not daring to sound hopeful. Makepeace knew more than she did about navigating the system when you weren't even really in the system anymore, maybe he had some tricks up his sleeve she hadn't thought of yet. "I know they had to fork it over for my school supplies and stuff. Then there's tuition.... " She trailed off, maybe this wouldn't work. "But, like, there's that money carers are supposed to get for the extra stuff. That money shitty foster parents steal." Lex had had that experience. Some foster parents really were in it for the money and lied on forms about what they had had to buy, leaving the kids with nothing.

---

"Nah." Makepeace responded with a sympathetic shrug. "The homes where I lived had everything down to a racket. price club food, thrift store clothes and shoes... If they saw me wearing this stuff, they'd be going ballistic wondering why they're not getting a cut of whatever rich trust fund I'm drawing from. I want to get emancipated so I won't have to go back next summer. Means getting a job, paying my keep and such. but it's gotta be better than the system."

---

"I'd prolly go ballistic too." Lex sounded slightly defensive. She was the kind of foster kid he was referring to. "I wouldn't get shit from my parents, dead or alive," she said her voice verging on hostility. She leaned back in her seat, crossing her arms and glaring off to the side. Great, he couldn't - or wouldn't - help. "I can't even buy a fucking candy bar here." She felt anger rise in her chest again. Makepeace might have been in the system but she was beginning to feel that he really wasn't anything like her. So what if he had to have cheap food and wear thrift store clothes during the summer? When he came here he paraded around in expensive suits just like any of the other rich brats. "Yeah, rent. Too bad. Not gonna end up in a homeless shelter though." Lex wasn't an idiot. She knew that most foster kids simply got thrown on the street when they aged out and had to find their way to a homeless shelter. Some sought out their family, hoping they would take them in, but Lex wasn't going to do that. She would never go back to her parents.

---

"Generally speaking, you won't see a lot of witches and wizards in shelters, Lex. Even poor, they still get by... Mostly through magical squatters' rights. If you buy a parcel of land with a tree on it, you can build a house inside the tree, and practically-speaking, it can be huge inside..." He sighed and looked at her, feeling words leaving his mouth before he fully considered them. "Would you want me to adopt you if and when I get emancipated?" His teeth clicked shut after he said it, and he looked mildly shocked to have made it, but he wasn't backpedaling.

---

Magical squatters' rights, that wasn't something she'd heard about in classes. It sounded like a pretty good deal and she certainly hoped she'd be good enough at magic when she graduated to make use of it. Bigger on the inside was a magical trait she'd encountered already and it would be pretty awesome to basically live in a magical treehouse. She wouldn't be confined to at best a tiny, cheap apartment.

Makepeace's next words snapped Lex out of her brief daydreaming. She had been leaning back in her chair but now she sat bolt upright, her entire body stiffening as if some loud noise had startled her. For a moment she was completely silent. She couldn't seem to process what he had said and she didn't know how to react. Weren't these the words she had wanted to hear for so long? But they were words she had given up on. She had resigned herself to a future that did not involve a family. Then a single word echoed back in her mind. If. She had heard that word from adults so many times. If you're good your daddy won't hit you. If you behave you can stay with your brother. If you're nice your foster parents will want to keep you. Years of broken promises had closed her off. Not trying and getting her hopes up meant she couldn't be let down and get hurt.

Suddenly Lex stood up from her chair, eyes still wide with shock, looking slightly wild. "If," she repeated back as though he could read her thoughts. "You can't... " her voice broke. "You can't say that to me." She grabbed her bag off the table and took a step back, stumbling as her legs bumped into her chair. "If you get emancipated. If you don't realize you don't like me. If you're approved. If it's even legal." She had to leave the room. She felt as if the walls were closing in. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Lex turned and began striding toward the door, wanting to run but afraid her legs wouldn't obey.

---

Makepeace stuffed his hand in his pocket and nodded, picking up the brooms and carrying them with him towards the door. "Yhat's their world, Lex. Not ours. My version of' If' is something along the lines of, 'If I have to confund every social worker and family court judge from here to Timbuktu so hard that they forget their own names for a week.' or''If I have to find your parents and make them make it legal.'"

[Snick]

Lex stopped and paused a moment before she turned around to face Makepeace. She contemplated just leaving and not listening to him anymore but something made her stay. "My parents don't have any rights over me and if they did they wouldn't care," Lex quipped back not wanting to show how overwhelmed she was and wanting to give herself time to respond to the other things he'd said. She felt conflicted and confused and though she tried to hide it it showed through in her face and in her body language. Then, of course, those feelings made her angry as well. And, always skeptical of people's intentions, she was suspicious too. All these emotions created turmoil inside her and she wasn't sure how to deal with it all.

"Why? You don't even know me. Why would you want to do that?" She couldn't bring herself to say the word adopt. She would only let negative reasons come to the forefront of her mind. She was untrusting of both herself and Makepeace. She couldn't believe that anyone ever did anything out of the goodness of their heart but she also didn't want to let herself want what Makepeace offered. She had learned that wanting and hoping only lead to disappointment and she couldn't let herself want something like this. She couldn't let herself believe that anything good could come out of Makepeace's proposal because the disappointment would be too great.

---

"I'm not really sure why I said it myself." Makepeace admitted with a shrug. "Maybe because i know what it's like to be in the system, and if I had a way off of the sinking ship, it'd be the only decent thing to do, let you in the life raft. You're smart, unlike a lot of the girls I meet in the homes. Not a slut or a klepto. Not some troublemaker looking to stir up shit." Life's served you up a double serving of shit sandwich. but you're still an okay person. A smart ass, but not an asshole about it." He shrugged again. He liked her, despite the fact she was rough around the edges, admired her spunk... but he wasn't going to tell her that. She'd think he was trying to get into her pants.

---

Lex bit the insides of her cheeks. She shoved her hands in her pockets, trying not to fidget but pulling at a hole in the pocket of her jeans anyway. She felt like she was going to cry but she wasn't sure why. Though she had always put up a hard exterior and though she had had to deal with so much so soon, she was still a child. She was a heartbroken, suspicious and untrusting child, but a child nonetheless.

She knew it was bad to imagine such an uncertain future and she didn't want to let her mind wonder forward to the possibilities of living with Makepeace but she couldn't stop herself. What would it be like to finally have a place that she couldn't be uprooted from at any moment? She could have a bedroom where she wasn't afraid to unpack her things into a dresser. Where she could hang posters and pictures on the wall. She could own more than just what fit in a couple of garbage bags. Yet even as she imagined these positives, these things that she had wanted for so long her mind slipped to more potential problems. What about tuition for school? Would she still get money for school and supplies? Where would they get money for food and furniture?

"Can you... " her voice came out quieter than before. Her hand curled into a fist and she hit the side of her leg a few times, desperately trying to keep from crying. "Can you promise?" She immediately felt stupid saying it and looked away, biting her lips again. She knew perfectly well that promises didn't really mean anything, that people broke them all the time. It wasn't as if anything magical was going to come out of him uttering the words.

"If this doesn't happen.... I can't.... " She didn't know what she was going to say. She couldn't what? She couldn't be let down again? She couldn't go back to foster care? Or what? Putting any kind of trust in Makepeace felt more dangerous than anything she had ever done. She would spend the night in Throckwattle house to know that she didn't have to worry about Makepeace letting her down.

---

Makepeace sighed, "I can't promise. I'm going to have to talk to Corky. I'm way out of my depth here." He said, cringing at the thought of a long, screechy-voiced lecture he was going to get on just how insane this all sounded. And didn't it? It sounded vaguely like the plot for a Fox teen drama. He could imagine the sorts of things Corky was going to shrill at him "i just told you to look after her, Makepeace! What the hell were you thinking? You're probably going to end up hurting her more than her parents and foster parents ever did!" And she'd be right.

---

Lex's heart sank. Though she knew that even if he had promised it wouldn't mean anything, it was still hard for her to hear it. She wanted to be angry, to yell at him and hit things, but it fell like she couldn't sum up the energy. It would be so much easier to get angry, to project her feelings outward instead of having to actually deal with them. "You do that." She said, taking step back. Her voice was strained. She had to leave. She rarely cried and she couldn't let herself cry in front of Makepeace. She made a half hearted gesture toward the door, now too afraid to speak and turned to leave. As she walked away she pulled on the hood of her sweater and ducking her head, not wanting anyone to see her face.