July 3 '71: Walking Disaster: Phoebe

[Edgar Bones]

▶︎ only finding questions in answers
{at a laundromat in the neighborhood}

Pheebs had asked him to do one thing while she was running errands.

Laundry.

He'd made what he felt was a compelling case against this - that he should go with her on the errands and then they could do the laundry together, didn't she want to spend time with him? - but was kissed goodbye and left to his own devices. Apparently his longtime girlfriend - and now live in girlfriend - thought that divvying up chores would help them be more efficient at them, and that logic could hardly be argued against, however much Ed had attempted to...

The problem wasn't that he didn't want to do his part. He did want to help with things in their shared life, but he'd never had to do laundry before. Ever.

At Hogwarts? The elves took care of it all! At home? His mum did! And while Mum had tried explaining the process to him in the past, he'd honestly not paid attention, and so today? Surrounded by muggles who knew exactly what they were doing, Ed contemplated asking for help. He could just give a big smile to one of the elderly ladies eyeing him over their knitting, make some joke about being a poor kid new to the city, get their advice...

But the floppy haired young man had his pride yet, and didn't want any of the ladies telling Phoebe he'd needed help once she got back. He instead leisurely scanned the room tightly packed with machines, their buzzing and humming something he didn't know if he'd be able to tune out. He started towards one end of the room before noticing that the people were taking out dry clothes from that side; neck reddening, Ed shifted the bag of laundry from one shoulder to the other and quickly found the different looking machines.

There were only two types, right?

There were the briefest of instructions on the machine, so after scanning them the lad dumped their clothes inside of the washer, put quite a lot of the soap in - with Auror training starting up in days, he'd been exercising like mad, surely a ton of the cleaning agent was necessary to rid his clothing of sweat - and slipped coins into the slot until the thing started beeping at him. The tall lad twitched at the unexpected sound, coughed to cover it up, and after a few attempts successfully found the "start" button, evidently, since he heard water rushing into the thing...

Feeling rather accomplished, Ed grinned and nodded along to the mellow background music coming out of somewhere hidden, trying to not look too abundantly pleased with himself. An eighteen-year-old muggle should know how to do this, shouldn't they? Keeping his machine in sight, he bundled up the laundry bag and took a seat in the waiting chairs lining the windows...

The first sign that something was wrong came when he opened up the washer. The colors were just off. The whites were no longer white, and he wasn't successful at freeing the clasp of a bra of Phoebe's from one of his nicer shirts without damaging both items a bit. But surely the other machine would fix things; feeling slightly less confident, he heaved the sopping pile from one machine to the other kind, did his best with choosing the settings, and...

He was sitting on the floor, shrunken dresses and discolored T's half folded around him, when he saw familiar shoes next to the nearest pile. Ed looked up in a slight panic, not having figured out a way to play this off as a joke yet. If they had these blasted machines at home, surely he could've worked out how to do this perfectly with magic! However...

"Babe, don't be mad." A promising start. "I thought I could - I thought I could figure it out," he let out in a rush.

[Phoebe Bones]

It had seemed so easy on paper, moving in with Edgar. They'd been together for years - long distance - at this point. Surely the two of them could handle living together. They had plenty of opposition from their parents, which hadn't been all that surprising. But it was clear to Phoebe that she was making the right decision. She loved Edgar, and she couldn't imagine her life without him. Kyra had been equally as upset, which was still something Phoebe was trying to manage. She knew they had always talked about living in the dorms together at University, but surely they would still see each other! It wasn't like they were really all that far apart.

Still, it was a different life than living at home. For starters, she'd had to find a laundromat for them to use since their flat didn't have one. That had been simple enough. But they needed cleaning supplies, light bulbs, the list seemed endless. Thankfully her parents had given her a graduation gift of money, something she was putting to good use as they gathered things for their new place.

And Edgar, as sweet as he was, was starting to drive her a tad mad. She hadn't wanted to admit that to him, of course. She had just gotten so used to her space being, well, hers. And now everything was theirs. She didn't know much about his school he had gone, other than the fact he and Fabian had shared a dorm. Which meant he was used to living with other people. So she had left him to do laundry on his own, confident that it was something he'd be capable of handling. It was a lot easier to get her shopping done when she didn't have him distracting her, and she could use the alone time. However, as she walked back into the laundromat, she was beginning to regret her choice to leave him by himself.

Don't be mad?!

She picked up a dress from the floor, although she supposed she'd have to wear it as a shirt now since it had certainly lost some length. "How..." No, that was a silly question. She knew exactly how this had happened. But how had he made it this far in life without learning how to do laundry? You are in public, surrounded by people. Who probably are wondering the exact same things you are.

"You could have just told me you didn't know how to do this Edgar," she said through gritted teeth, doing her best to keep her voice even. She could just hear Kyra on the other end of the phone, laughing as Phoebe recounted this tale to her later over what was going to be a very full cup of wine. "Which begs the question, how do you not know how to do laundry?"

[Edgar Bones]

Should've prepped an answer for that...

He'd seen Phoebe upset before - could'n't've been together so long without pissing each other off a few times - but this was...unfortunate.

This whole living-together-experiment was in its infancy, and Ed didn't want to screw it up, didn't want to disappoint her, didn't want to prove their parents right. He wanted to keep going to bed with her, waking up with her, cooking together, palling about the nearby parks, everything...

Everything - every normal little life thing - that they hadn't been able to do with him being at his boarding school. Knowing that he'd be going home to Phoebe after a long if exhilarating day of Auror training was a surreal and phenomenal thing that he did not want to give up. He knew their parents weren't absolutely on board, that it had been a risk for her to take this chance on him...and to mess up something that should be so simple wasn't going to help up her confidence in this at all.

"I'm sorry Pheebs, I'll make it right," he said earnestly, swirling the clothing into the laundry bag before she saw any now-ruined favorite pieces. Shite, he thought in frustration, if only I'd hidden everything before she got in... If his girlfriend hadn't been the wiser of the situation, he could've probably fixed this with magic at their apartment. But she'd seen the evidence, and...There's got to be a muggle solution to this. And as to her question...face red, the young man stood with the burdensome bag of failure over a shoulder, and while he needed to look down to see her fury, Ed had hardly felt so small. "I just never...needed to? There was a laundry at school that took care of it for us, Mum did at home..." F*cking hell, you sound about eight years old. "How did - er - getting the supplies go?"

[Phoebe Bones]

Her mother’s voice was doing nothing but repeating warnings in her mind, telling her that she was making a mistake moving in with him. They were too young and they weren’t married and what did she really know about the boyfriend who had spent so many years going to some fancy boarding school? Oh, her mother had made her so angry, it had only convinced her more that moving in with Edgar was what she wanted. But staring at him and this mess, she was suddenly understanding exactly what her mother meant. At least, to an extent. Because he didn’t know how to do laundry and it was something she had been doing for ages. Edgar’s mother was such a sweet woman, but Phoebe was beginning to question on how Mrs. Bones had expected Edgar to survive on his own if he couldn’t even wash clothing.

”What kind of f*cking crazy school did you go to?” she asked, rubbing her temples as she watched him gather all their clothes in a laundry bag. She understood teaching him how to cook things, that hadn’t even been the slightest surprise to her. But doing their laundry? It’s not as if the Bones family lived in a giant mansion, surely they didn’t send their kids to some rich school where they never had to lift a finger. But what other kind of boarding school had dormitories and people to do your laundry? ”I mean, I thought the teaching you to drive was little odd, but what did you even learn? Oh shite,” she sighed as she picked up a sweater that hadn’t yet made it into the basket. ”Kyra is going to find this hilarious until she learns her favorite sweater is now pink and too small. Tell me, how exactly are you going to fix this? Do you even know why this happened?”

[Edgar Bones]

Pheebs wasn't taking any of his sh*t, and this wasn't the best time or place for it. He looked around the muggle laundromat, red faced in embarrassment, as she went off. The stooped little muggle ladies - who hadn't been any help earlier, even though they'd likely seen him doing it all wrong - were looking over their newspapers and knitting at the young couple, and Ed could nearly hear their tsks of disappointment. He swept a pink sweater that was Kyra's, apparently, into the bag, trying to regain some confidence along with some quick thinking. The eyes on them weren't helping, and neither was picturing his girlfriend relaying the tale to her best friend. Kyra had been just chuffed to find out that Phoebe was rooming with him instead of her...would she try to use this to get Phoebe to go back to their plan?

"I'm sorry, babe," he said earnestly, avoiding talk of his school as she'd avoided letting him know how her shopping had gone. He couldn't exactly tell her about Charms and Transfiguration classes, even if those were skills he was good at - and could use to fix their clothes. "Just - leave it to me for a day, and it will be fixed. Got some magic up my sleeve, even if this isn't my forte." He nodded towards the door, and the discontented, to say the least, pair started out. The bag over his shoulder was much heavier this go around. "Gonna take a wild guess and say that red needs to stay away from everything else? That seems to be the troublemaking one."

[Phoebe Bones]

It was absolutely perfect that their first little spat would be in this laundromat, surrounded by ladies clearly judging her relationship. Edgar had taken the sweater from her hand, and she turned around to give them a glare as he finished gathering the rest of the mess he had made. While she was absolutely furious - what kind of grown adult has to be taught how to drive and do laundry - it was her place to be annoyed, and she didn't need their judgmental looks. Even a kind smile from one of them was met with nothing but an icy glare, one that was turned on Edgar as he apologized once more for the mishap as the headed out the door.

Adjusting the bag of supplies on their shoulder, she rolled her eyes as they walked back towards their flat, giving him a look from the corner of her eye. "That would be a good start," she snapped, crossing her arms in front of her chest. She wanted to be nothing but mad, it was no laughing matter that he'd ruined their clothes! But it was also all so absurd, his inability to do the most basic things without a helping hand. "I have no idea how you are planning on fixing the laundry, but let's go over some basics. Keep your whites separate from your darks, don't use fabric softener on towels, and some things can only be washed in cold water. Oh - and then there's the whole step of washing delicate, and letting things air dry."

Turning to him as she stopped at the corner of the street, she gave a long sigh. She could stay mad at him all day if she wanted, but that wasn't going to accomplish anything. But she had not signed on to teach him how to survive outside of his fancy boarding school, they were equals in this. "What else do Kyra and I need to give you and the boys lessons in?"

[Edgar Bones]

Even the eternal optimist couldn’t deny that this really wasn’t going very well.

He’d thought that assimilating into muggle life would be simple enough; Mum was one after all, and he’d grown up on a muggle street, and had dated a muggle for years now and not been found out. But it was turning out that the practical aspects of muggle life that he hadn’t had to be part of before, from driving to cleaning, were not as easy as he’d anticipated. Sure, if left alone in their apartment Edgar could clean like the best of them - with magic. And he’d use that to his advantage tomorrow when she was out, or in the middle of the night when she was asleep, to fix this current disaster and come up for a believable lie as to how he’d done it. Because he had to fix this, he had to make Phoebe not regret the decision to move forward with him. Hell, they’d only just moved in and already he was seeming incompetent! Not the best start, not the best way to prove he was the partner for her… This was the woman he wanted as his partner for the rest of his life, she was his future wife, the future mother of his children. But there was no way he’d keep someone as phenomenal as her by his side if he couldn’t do the most basic of muggle tasks!

You could come clean, a nagging voice reminded him. The same nagging voice that told him this whenever he was caught in a lie, or whenever he was feeling particularly close to her. The want to tell her everything about the parts of his life she knew nothing about was overwhelming at times, but as the years passed and his involvement in the war became more reality than fantasy… the problem became more complex. Besides it being against the law to tell Phoebe about the hidden world of magic, the more she knew, the more danger she’d be in if she was ever caught by the wrong side…

You can’t keep quiet forever.

And so Edgar nodded along, cataloging her notes mentally, as they left the laundromat and she let him in on some clues for future success. She was still pissed, and Ed didn’t anticipate the feeling fading much before they got home, so was relieved that when they stopped at a light she took a moment to breathe and, seemingly resigned, let him in again. It was with admitted shame that Ed felt his neck flush again, and he adjusted the heavy laundry bag on his shoulder before responding. "We’re fine at basic cooking and cleaning," he assured her with all the gusto he could muster. Kyra and the Prewetts won’t let you live this down. "Proficient motorists now, thanks to you two. Suppose we’ll need to be more cognizant of budgeting and the like," Ed continued as the light changed, and reached for her hand as they crossed the street.

[Phoebe Bones]

There’s something strange about Edgar Bones, Phoebe.

The words her best friend had uttered more than once in the time since she and Edgar had gotten together rang in her mind as he nodded along with her laundry instructions. She knew that there was something different about all of the Bones’ really, right along with the Prewetts. While she had never been to the twins house, she had always assumed they grew up in the same sort of neighborhood. You don’t even know where the Prewetts lived before this, do you? That was question for another time, when she wasn’t irritated with her boyfriend. When she had learned they all went off to boarding school at eleven, she’d figured that it was just that the Bones were secretly rich. Gregory did work for the government, although he never spoke much about his work. That was simply how the Bones and Prewett families worked, they just didn’t talk about some things. Like their fancy boarding school, or anything that had to do with the rich posh life they must have had.

But he’s not a posh arse, and you know that.

Edgar was so pleased to speak of the things he could do, and she felt herself smirk as he mentioned budgeting. That was at least one she had some experience in, although most of her prior work experience in their hometown had been babysitting. Slipping her hand into his, she gave him a smile as they crossed, waiting until they’d reached the other side before she spoke. “I ran into our post lady this afternoon, Margaret Robbins. You remember her right?” Phoebe asked as they walked the street, an idea slowly coming to her. “At least you better, she always leaves chocolate in the mailbox for me. Anyway, she mentioned her anniversary with her husband is coming up and they need a babysitter. I have to call Kyra to see if she is willing to help, since three kids is a lot.” And while Phoebe was positive her and her best friend would be able to handle the kids, “What were your plans for next weekend?”

[Edgar Bones]

Instead of pulling away, Phoebe was smiling and changing gears as smoothly as she'd taken his hand. Ed knew that he was in no way in the clear about the laundromat mishaps, and that he'd have to get in touch with Mum covertly to go over his cover. Soon. Because he'd fix the clothes with magic tonight and use "sage laundry wisdom" from his mother as the means. That would work. Right? Pheebs would have her suspicions, and Mum wasn't keen on being an intermediate now that they were sticking it out on their own (she'd covered for him enough with relaying letters over the years), but...a bandage approach won't fix things forever. You're gonna have to confront the truth with her eventually...

But for now, he'd hope for the best, the bag bouncing against his back feeling lighter with each step. Ed eagerly jumped onto Phoebe's new train of thought. Olive branch extended. Accepted. Even if it meant giving up some of the weekend after his first week of Auror training to babysit instead of recuperate, latching on would hopefully really put a pin in his Mistake of the Day. Also, his girlfriend had asked what his plans were, so may've already signed him on to help. With two younger siblings of his own and days of babysitting hours logged, Edgar knew that he'd be able to handle the weekend with Mrs. Robbins' kids. Even a half-dead Edgar Bones had more energy than the average human, right? And how tiring could Auror training really be? Didn't McGonagall say it was like constant N.E.W.T. practicals - "Yeah, I know her. She's wounded my heart many times already by only leaving the chocolate for you," he teased. "Three kids? You and I can handle that," he continued confidently, sending a wink her way. "Much better than my plan of reading and resting up for training. When does she need us?"

[Phoebe Bones]

Later, when the thought didn’t still make her irritated, she’d sit down and write out some laundry instructions for her boyfriend. And the next time, she’d stick with him while he did the laundry. He had objected to being left alone, and now that she understood the why of it, a part of her was blaming herself for not catching on sooner. He may have gone to some fancy posh school that hadn’t taught him any life skills, but that was part of what made him Edgar. And maybe she could look at it differently, after all they’d had so much fun teaching the boys to drive. Having Edgar in the kitchen with her, learning as she went about cooking. Those were memories made together, and that had to mean something.

Phoebe didn’t stop the laugh from tumbling out, knowing full well Edgar was on teasing her. Mrs. Robbins’ had been one of the most welcoming people to them when they had only been looking at the apartment, giving them her opinion of the place. In a way, the woman reminded her of her own mother, and while she wasn’t going to admit it there was something she had been missing. Getting up everyday with Edgar was absolutely amazing and she wouldn’t trade it for the world - but having her mum wake her up in the mornings had been a staple in her life for so long. Perhaps that was why she’d already volunteered her time to help the Robbins out.

“I appreciate that you think we can handle three kids on our own,” she grinned, giving his hand a squeeze. Edgar was good with kids, Phoebe already knew that. After all, they’d only been running around the neighborhood together since they were kids themselves. Plus Edgar had the experienced of being the oldest brother. She knew one day in the future, he’d make a wonderful father to their kids. “But I’m inviting Kyra - although.” she smirked over to him, “We could get Fabian to come too, and then who knows maybe he’ll actually ask Kyra for a date for the first time.”

[Edgar Bones]

Okay. We're laughing, we're talking, we're not getting hit by a bus - we're all right.

    Getting some great material for your vows, eh?

"Your patience and forgiveness know no end, although I've tested that many times before today. While I will continue to keep you on your toes, I promise to do my best to never intentionally be deserving of your ire..." 

The vote of confidence she gave him was quickly rescinded - but perhaps not because Phoebe didn't think he was mad for thinking they could manage a household of children. "All right then, Ms. I'm-Full-of-Ulterior-Motives-When-It-Comes-To-Inviting-Our-Friends-Places," Ed said with a knowing chuckle, shaking his head as their joined hands swung between them on their walk back to the apartment. The heart Phoebe had for her friends was commendable, one of the reasons he couldn't help but fall for her, and Ed wished that getting their mutual friends together was as simple as throwing them in the same house with a bunch of cute kids and having them co-parent for a while. They'd picked up where they'd left off last summer easily enough, it seemed, when they'd all gotten together the other week for a driving lesson. But his brother was keeping his distance from the muggle girl for the same reasons that Edgar hadn't been completely honest with his girlfriend.

Who the wiser of them was - the one denying his feelings or the one denying his magic - was yet to be seen.

It's neither of us. No way this all doesn't bite us both in the arse before long. 

"She's welcome to do the asking herself if she's all that interested," he suggested with a cheeky wink, having the feeling that Fabian would be stunned into acceptance rather than rejection. Fabs was overthinking all of this, wasn't he? He needed to be surprised by it. "He'd never be able to say no to her like that." If they can just try, then at least they'd have tried! If it works out - great. If not - not so great, would complicate things, but at least we'd all know then. Right?