and i knew the lights of the city were too heavy for me (open)

[gasleaks]

Who: Credence and other folk
What: Meeting people, doing work, buying too many chocolates - the usual, although maybe not necesscarily in that order.
When: September 3&4
Where: Braelyne/Hogsmede (9/3), Kockturn Alley/Diagon Alley (9/4)
Note: I'll match format, I'm just about #aesthetic so.


september 3rd

Credence went to get the trace when it was announced - of course he did, he's learned that the best way to deal with things is to do what people tell you to unless there's a compelling reason not to do so. He doesn't actually have a reason to not want to comply with what the Ministry wants from him yet, so he's done everything they've asked of him.

At any rate, they allowed him a house in Hogsmede which he doesn't own but it's more his than anything has ever been in his life. His boss gave him a day off to move in, which Credence tried to explain he didn't need but he lost that battle so after moving his one whole box of belongings to his new house and arranging all his books on a shelf there's not really much else to do besides head into town and look around.

Credence never had a reason to be here before, didn't actually know it existed before they asked him if he'd like to live in a section for the time displaced, so he wanders through the town with the intent of comitting it to memory. It's not hard, given that he walked almost everywhere in New York, but it'll take some getting used to. He's used to straightforward layouts, not the way everything in the wizarding world seems to veer off into alleyways and things aren't always the size or shape they should be.

He ends up at the potluck for a while, but eventually he wanders out of Braelyne and into Hogsmede, because it's there and he's never been to Hogsmede either. It's not curfew yet, and he's supposed to be familiarizing himself with the area so he tries to memorize Hogsmede too. If he didn't already work somewhere else, Credence doesn't think this would be such a bad place to make a living.

Honeydukes stops him in his tracks. He knows, from wandering the streets of New York, that shops of just candy exist. Credence has seen them before, he's even had candy since his arrival in London, but this is.

It's overwhelming, honestly. There are things Credence can and has gotten used to - the way pictures move, the fact that owls deliver mail - but he's never had to deal with so many things that don't make sense to his version of the world at once. That there could be such decadence and sin all in one place, with magic to top it all off, is unthinkable.

He barely makes it back before curfew.

september 4th

The Floo Network has been explained to him, in detail, but it's not particularly fond of his accent or something so it lands Credence squarely in Knockturn Alley when he first tries to use it to get to work. He's been in Knockturn Alley before - occasionally something will come through the shop that someone else has been looking for and he has to make a delivery - but he finds it harder to navigate starting from where he usually ends.

It takes a good deal of wandering and the help of some shopkeepers who recognize him before he figures out which way he's supposed to be going but eventually, Credence makes his way to the secondhand bookstore he works at. He's mainly shelving the books that came in the previous day while moving the ones that have ended up places they're not supposed to be to where they should be and trying to keep the shop cat from destroying books because it's bored.

None of it is really a job that requires a lot of specialized skill or magic, although the shop owner keeps insisting his work would go faster if he used magic to do it. Credence isn't so sure - it seems to him like a lot of his work is because of magic and using magic to fix a problem caused by magic seems like a futile task to him. Not that he would even know the words to make such things happen - he's been trying to learn spells from the old textbooks that come through the shop but they just don't work for him. Probably because, like he insisted when he arrived, he's not a wizard at all.

Even if he knows what Ma said about his real mother. Even if there's a part of him that knows the Obscurus exists inside him.

Around lunchtime, Credence can be found next door at Fortescue's. It's possible someone should tell him to eat real food at some point, because he's something of a fixture at the shop and he never goes anywhere else for lunch. When you don't have to eat because you're actually smoke in the shape of a human and the equivalent of a freshman in college who's realized there are no parents to tell you no, it's hard to see the point in eating anything but what tastes best. Like . . . a vegetable or something else healthy.

Afterward, he goes back to work. It's not particularly busy - there aren't any students wanting textbooks for Hogwarts and people haven't quite started looking for Christmas presents yet, so the customers are mostly people who come in to either sell their books or browse. It's not particularly busy, so it's easy to catch Credence for a conversation. He leaves at 7, though, just to get home with enough time to not even be close to missing curfew.