Year/Job
Intrepid Reporter
Travis
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Post by Martin Abbott on Jan 19, 2024 13:59:07 GMT -8
Money is no object was still a new concept for Martin who had spent his twenties crashing on couches and bouncing his way through various subcultures. Maybe it was odd to finally be settling down in his late thirties, but once he and Liliana were reunited he hadn't wanted anything else but to experience everything he had since graduation all over again—it wasn't exactly a perfect recreation of Martin's life in between. There were no militant purebloods in their life, for example, but it never stopped feeling like an adventure with her.
Even this, standing in a large London flat with Liliana weighing the possibility of moving in, felt like an adventure in itself. Martin hadn't lived in a permanent place since his childhood home in Sheffield. He'd spent years living out of hotels, sleeping in cots and on hard floors and cold dirt. If he had any doubt about the place, it washed away when he turned away from the view of the flat's wide windows and saw Liliana standing there.
The mood was only stifled when the small woman conducting their tour slipped in from behind Liliana and squeaked with a smile, "What do you think?"
"Can we have a minute?" Martin asked, and the woman happily obliged. Martin closed the space between himself and Liliana, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her into himself.
"What do you think?" he asked. "Do you think it's too big?"
Liliana Quinn
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Year/Job
Quinn Brooms President
My stubborn mind & his steady heart. |
Slytherin
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Post by Liliana Quinn on Jan 19, 2024 15:42:49 GMT -8
Liliana hadn’t had a permanent home since 2014. At the end of the school year, after Martin had finished his assignment, she abruptly quit her job. Sometimes she missed her students but the world was out there, waiting to be explored with Martin by her side. She gave Quinn Brooms another try, hoping that she would enjoy it more this time around.
She spent almost a decade traveling the world with Martin, him chasing stories and Liliana expanding her father’s company. She never missed home because she wasn’t even sure where that was. She’d bounced around from Italy, to Chelsea, to Hogwarts, then around the world after graduation. She wasn’t sure how home felt.
Liliana stood in the middle of the room watching her boyfriend in silence as he looked at the view of London. She’d stopped looking around the apartment pretty quickly, only giving the rooms a quick glance, then spent the rest of the tour watching Martin instead. She was grateful when he asked for a minute and she smiled up at him when he pulled her close.
“It think, maybe, we don’t need four bedrooms.”
It was just the two of them and it wasn’t like they were planning to add more people to the equation.
Her hand rested on his chest, staying in his arms, but looked away and around the large living room. She’d turn down two places already for the exact same reason but this one was close to QB headquarters. She is wasn’t going to find a cute little home downtown. She just didn’t want to feel like she was living back in the empty Quinn mansion all over again.
“I suppose I might need an office and you could have a space to sit down and write. It’s smaller than the last one, right?” Why did she feel like she was trying to convince herself?
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Year/Job
Intrepid Reporter
Travis
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Post by Martin Abbott on Jan 20, 2024 13:23:33 GMT -8
It wasn't just Liliana being difficult about this decision. It was awfully late for Martin to be shopping for a place of his own, but he and Liliana had never lived or loved on regular time. Their lives were timelines weaving in and out of each other until finally crossing over and staying there as one line stretching out into forever. That's all Martin cared about, not the place itself but that the place was with Liliana. So it shouldn't have mattered much where they stayed, right? But the closer to the heart of London they looked, the less any of these places felt like home.
It wasn't that Martin missed their life on the road, it was that the vaulted ceilings, the wide windows, the sheer number of rooms felt like some kind of betrayal of his principles. Why should he deserve such a large place in a city where one in fifty people were unhoused? A part of Martin envied that Liliana's sister managed to have it both ways: a successful career in the public eye and a quiet life off the grid in a small little cottage somewhere. That was the kind of living they'd gotten used to together.
He was a bit relieved to see Liliana trying to talk herself into it. It wasn't just because of him that they were still staying at Michael and Camila's flat in Chelsea. This was the first permanent decision they'd made together since quitting their jobs ten years earlier, and it was so much like Liliana to need to decision to be perfect before making it that Martin couldn't help but love her for it. He held her close to himself, feeling her hand on his chest while she talked her way through it.
"It's not right," Martin said, worried that he'd let her suffer through her justifications for too long. "Maybe it's a simple way to look at things, but if it doesn't feel right on our first impression, why should we talk ourselves into it if it's not right?" Martin leaned out and gently took Liliana's chin into his hand so that he could study her green eyes. "I don't have to talk myself into being recklessly in love with you."
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Year/Job
Quinn Brooms President
My stubborn mind & his steady heart. |
Slytherin
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Post by Liliana Quinn on Jan 21, 2024 0:54:05 GMT -8
Martin had been her home for a decade, maybe even longer than that even though she had fought to forget it for so long. She spent most of her early twenties chasing the comfort she lost when they parted ways at eighteen. The closest thing she had found was her time teaching at Hogwarts, but that was still just a cheap replacement for it. It wasn't until they reunited that Liliana was at peace. She let the ghosts of her past go for the chance to build a life with Martin. And she made damn sure the next ten years were full of love to replace the decade lost to them.
Her gaze traveled from the high ceilings to the hardwood panels on the floor. This wasn’t home at all. It was spacious but felt cold and impersonal. When she thought about home, she could only picture the three months they had spent in the Brazilian amazon. Their small, elevated home forced them to cram in close together. She remembered laying in Martin’s arms at night, in complete darkness, while the sound of the rainforest lulled them to sleep. None of the industrial lights of London reflected back to them through the floor to ceiling windows while they stood in this empty apartment.
Liliana looked up at him as he pulled her attention back to him by gently grabbing her chin in his strong hand. She felt something pull at her heart while he spoke and she couldn’t understand how he could still make her feel like an eighteen year old falling in love for the first time. She felt instant relief when he agreed with her. How could two people, so completely opposite of each other, always end up with the same answers and feelings?
“So reckless you’d follow me back to this boring city?” she asked. She knew it was her tendency to self sabotage speaking now, but Martin always gave her time to voice her feelings and then tried to comfort her. But she had to know; would he be fine settling down after living a life full of adventure? “You can still back out, you know. You can keep traveling and I’ll be here when you’re ready.”
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Year/Job
Intrepid Reporter
Travis
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Post by Martin Abbott on Jan 21, 2024 13:29:10 GMT -8
“You can still back out, you know. You can keep traveling and I’ll be here when you’re ready.”
Nope. Martin had lived that story once before, and he had no intention of replaying it. It was only that Martin didn't really know what he wanted from this new stage in their life. They'd been on the move for so long that settling down seemed like their biggest adventure yet. The only thing Martin knew was that, whatever they did, he wanted to do it with Liliana.
"I think," Martin started, really actually thinking as he spoke. "We've never had to make a decision like this before. It's always just been wherever QB needed you to go, and I found stories wherever I followed. I'd follow you to the end of the earth, Liliana. I already have." Martin pulled her back into himself again. "And I'm going to be the best damn housewife I can be while you're off making millions as the big corporate exec."
It wasn't totally true that Martin had only been following Liliana. It was his idea to even leave Hogwarts ten years ago, even if it was only supposed to be for a week. Though their reunion had begun as an icy series of awkward run-ins on campus, Martin had slowly worked his way back into Liliana's life by volunteering to help with the upkeep of her Quidditch pitch. They kept their acquaintance on the down low since, at the time, he was masquerading as a sixth year Hufflepuff and could lose his job if he got expelled. But Martin had grown fed up of watching Liliana's classes from his place atop the Quidditch stands. One day he approached her with a crazy idea.
"Let's go to Inverness," he said, producing a printout of a Facebook group devoted to hunting the Loch Ness Monster. He'd gotten the idea to write about Muggles' fascination with Magical Creatures, which they called "cryptids," buried in the depths of writer's block on the Hogwarts assignment. He needed to get out of the castle, he needed to write something for himself. "There's this group that's hunting for the Loch Ness Monster and I think it'd be fun to get in with them and see what they're all about. What do you think?"
Just one week, he said. One week with the weirdos, and they could go back to their lives.
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Year/Job
Quinn Brooms President
My stubborn mind & his steady heart. |
Slytherin
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Post by Liliana Quinn on Jan 22, 2024 23:07:55 GMT -8
Liliana never made choices without weighing the options first. That was usually her downfall. In the summer of 2003, she made the decision to let Martin go because she had convinced herself that someone was out there waiting for her help and Martin would be better off without her. She wasn't exactly wrong, Martin blossomed into an amazing, interesting person without her. And she wilted without him. Back then she was still haunted by the memory of someone else. But an encounter with Lawrence gave her the push she needed in order to let her past go and give her relationship with Martin another try.
By the time Martin came to her and asked her to go to Inverness with him, Liliana had no hesitation. She'd grown tired of hiding their renewed romance. She jumped at the opportunity to get a taste of what his life had been like all those years they'd been apart. It was only a week, right?
That week was the most magical time of her life. They integrated themselves into a group of muggles and spent it camping out near the vast waters of River Ness the first few days then making their way down the coast to Loch Ness. It was just the group in nature, the hope of catching a glimpse of Nessie (as the muggles had lovingly nicknamed the cryptid), long nights around a campfire, and no magic at all. Liliana had never spent much time with people from a completely different world, but their enthusiasm was infectious and every night she went to sleep with sore cheeks from how much she had smiled through out the day. On their last night there, with her head resting on Martin's chest and his hand lovingly running through her hair, she let out a long sigh and said, "I wish it could always be like this. I don't want to go back."
And that was it. She handed in her resignation at Hogwarts, not even finishing the last month of the school year, packed her bags and took off. Liliana took her old job at the broom company back and let them send her off into every corner of the world. This time Martin was by her side.
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Year/Job
Intrepid Reporter
Travis
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Post by Martin Abbott on Jan 23, 2024 16:16:21 GMT -8
The irony of Martin and Liliana's relationship was that they were always two people headed in the same direction. Liliana's work with Quinn Brooms tied her to a specific location, but Martin was willing to follow her anywhere on the earth. Twenty years ago he had even begged her to let him go. He had a scholarship to the University of Chicago and was supposed to be on a plane to America in a week, and he was begging her to let him throw it all away. And Martin would have if she had let him.
Martin had thrived through college, but there was always Liliana lingering there on his mind. Every new experience carried an asterisk. When they reconnected ten years later it was immediately about making up for past wrongs. Martin didn't believe that Liliana had made the wrong decision sending him off to college at the airport that day, but if she'd chosen the selfish option, if he'd followed her to South America instead, he didn't believe that he would be unhappy.
So on their last day in Inverness, when Liliana said, "I don't want to go back," Martin knew that he was once again facing an opportunity that few got to choose twice, and she was begging him to make the selfish choice for her.
"So let's stay here," Martin said. He was silent for a moment after speaking the words into existence, the only noise between them the rattling hum of the old hotel's heating system filling the room. He let the words sit there, let Liliana really consider them, let himself consider them, before he knew exactly what he wanted. "Or let's go somewhere else," he continued. "We don't have to live in Inverness, but anywhere but Hogwarts. I left that school behind a long time ago, but I didn't leave you there. You've been with me every step of the way, and I think it's time I followed you like I was supposed to from the beginning.
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