noonelaughed | Dated to 12/12, the wee hours of the morning

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tiny train ride

Dated to 12/12, the wee hours of the morning

By the time the party started dying down, and people had either decided they were going to stay where they were and sleep on Chris's floor or stumble back to their own home or to someone else's, Chris was fucking well off. He wasn't sure just how much he'd had to drink, and he'd definitely had at least two of those brilliant brownies that Effy'd brought along with her.

What Chris really needed, he'd decided, was some proper food. Like, food you could only get up at the compound. So, a group of them had decided to take the small train-- the one that had showed up with the snow had-- up to the compound kitchen. Only, that had been ages ago now and Chris wasn't entirely sure that they hadn't passed the compound already.

Fuck it. None of it really mattered, anyway. The night was still young.

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Standing up on a moving train might not seem like the best of ideas, small though said train may be, but Effy thinks it might just be the best one she's had all night. Granted, there are only so many ways one's legs can bend, and there comes a point when sitting in such a tiny cart just becomes impractical, but she's a small enough girl that standing isn't necessary. She does it because she can, however, arms extended out on either side and her head tilted back as the cold wind blows against her ears and through her air.

It is, she decides, the most fucking fantastic Effy has felt in a long, long while.

Whether her eyes are tearing up from the wind or the sheer beauty of it all, she can't quite say, but she finds herself transfixed by the night's sky above, remiss that she hasn't ever stopped to appreciate it. It's simply gorgeous.

Harry still had a bit of a buzz going, whether from the brownies or the alcohol he wasn't sure. But the cold air felt amazing on his flushed face and, looking up at Effy, he decided she had the right idea. He got up from the car he was seated on and started climbing his way closer. The train wasn't exactly moving at a dangerous speed, and even if his coordination was a bit off, it was still a fair shade better than a lot of people's. He wasn't Gryffindor's youngest seeker in a century for nothing, even if he wasn't on a broom just then.

He landed just behind Effy, grinning at his own attempts, and stood up straight with his arms flung wide. His desperately-in-need-of-a-cut hair flew back from his face and the wind made a faint whistling sound in his ears. Harry shut his eyes. "It's like flying," he said.

It wasn't at all, but he still felt like he was half-floating and could pretend for just a little while.

There's a joke in there somewhere, something to do with flying and being high out of their minds, but Effy dismisses it, almost angry at the thought for interrupting those of weightlessness and serenity. Like the party, it's both quiet and loud out here, but the sounds of the wind are nothing like the music, something more natural, more powerful. Something glorious.

"I've never flown before!" She shouts back, something she might find lamentable — try everything once, after all, and it did look fun in those movies — if she were anywhere approaching sober. But she isn't, and in this moment, she never wants to be again.

He wished he could take her flying at that very moment. Pluck his wand from his pocket, accio his Firebolt and hop on. Race the train, weave through tree trunks and trail their fingers over the sea. Climb and dive until they were dizzy and couldn't keep the horizon straight.

Harry opened his eyes and they were still on a train. "It's freedom," he told her over the wind. "It's the only way to live."

Freedom does sound nice, she must admit. The only way to live, he says, words echoing in her mind long after the fact. This, here, right now? This is the only way to live, she thinks. Without a care in the world — this one or the next — with her every sense kicked into overdrive. With colors that are too bright, even in the dark, and skin that tickles regardless of touch. Words that taste like spice, like honey, and sounds that bounce around inside her skull until they finally fade away.

"We're living now," she tells him, still staring at the sky. "Look! I've never seen stars like this." There's a lot, apparently, that she's never seen or done. It's a good thing she's getting them out of the way now.

There had been a kind of calm lingering around Harry in the last few days. It was unnatural for him, but he had not really questioned it until now. He had set himself up to die. In some ways, he had been going about life as if he were dead. Dead back home and therefore home didn't matter. But it did matter. It was all a part of him, all of his life and all of his death. He felt alive and connected, and for a little while it all made sense. They were living now and that meant everything, every part.

Harry tilted his head back, not expecting to know what he was looking at. Astronomy had never been a very strong subject for him. But the sky was completely unfamiliar, not even the simplest stars standing out to him. He laughed suddenly, a barking sound lost in the wind. Wouldn't Hermione be upset that here was another class that didn't help them.

"I love this place," he decided. "It makes no sense."

Whether she loves or hates Tabula Rasa depends entirely on Effy's mood at any given time, and right now, she couldn't be happier. That nothing here makes sense doesn't seem to matter at the moment, not the way it does when she's alone in her hut and missing her life, however shitty it had recently become. Right now, everything is fantastic, and despite making no sense at all, it's all crystal clear.

"It's the only thing that makes sense," yells Effy over the wind, because it sounds about right in her head, even if the statement itself is nonsensical. Sense, she's quickly beginning to find, is fleeting and, in this moment, rather useless.

The train took a turn, not hard but at enough of an angle that Harry's balance shifted and his shoe, wet with snow, slipped from the edge of his cart. More graceful on a broom than on land, Harry wasn't helped by the alcohol dulling certain senses too. Reflexively, he dropped his hands to the nearest thing available to give him balance - Effy's hips - before his foot found the bottom of his cart. "Merlin's-- Sorry," he laughed.

Effy laughs, too, but most likely not for the same reason. Having spent the past few hours swaying in cramped spaces against friends and strangers alike, she isn't in any state to object to his touch. In all honesty, it might well be among the tamest forms of contact she's experienced tonight, though that's more a testament to Chris's ability to through a party and her own culinary success. But if sense if still a factor, his apology makes none whatsoever, so she laughs. "What's he got to be sorry for?"

He didn't move his hands. Effy was a lot warmer than the wind and Harry hadn't realized how cold his fingers were until now. He blinked slowly, parsing her response, and laughed again. "Everything. Purebloods. Malfoy. Ugh, definitely Malfoy," he said, pulling a face.

Subconsciously — or consciously, it's hard to tell with how high she is and how much the train is moving — Effy leans into Harry's touch, because while it isn't the first time anyone has touched her tonight, it is the longest, and arguably the nicest. She's not used to it, and she wasn't even before the island, when there was no shortage of physical contact in her life. What's new is that it's just a hand on her hip and nothing more. This could easily be chaste, platonic, well-meaning; he's not trying to slide it up her shirt or down her skirt, and that makes all the difference. That sets him apart.

"I think I'm going to like you," she finally admits, almost thankful for the fact that she's so completely out of it, because she never would have said so otherwise.

"Really?" He sounded a little thrilled by the idea because he was. Whatever Snape, Malfoy, anyone said about Harry being worshiped and touted, Harry never saw it that way. Deep down inside, there was still a part of him that was that little boy shoved into a cupboard, taken out only when useful or necessary, whether it were to clean the dishes or to save the day. But there was none of that here, with the threat of both the Dursleys and Voldemort gone. If Effy said she liked him, it had to be that she liked Harry alone, not what he could do or what he stood for. And Harry liked to be liked. It wasn't the most important thing by far, but it warmed him through just then.

"I- I think I'm going to like you too," he said, even though he already did like her.

There is a part of Effy that doesn't quite believe it, but fortunately it is also a part easily silenced by too much energy and not enough sleep, by all the drugs and drinking and no food or water in her stomach to dilute it all. As little faith as she has in herself, she doesn't manage to hold onto to the thought for long, and it vanishes in the next instant, forgotten when the train jerks once again and she latches onto the nearest whatever. It's Harry's hand, the one not on her hip, and for whatever reason, that makes her laugh.

If there was anything Hermione could have picked from all of her experiences at Hogwarts as symbolic of all that the place meant to her, trains wouldn't have been it. That evening, though, she found herself sitting on the very last car of the small train which traveled and wove through the island, looking backwards, her hair carried off by the wind and looking more like the tangle she was once known for in Hogwarts, before she'd started to care about appearances, considering it a part of her identity that was important too, if not quite as much as the time she liked to pour into her texts and studies. Drawn first to the train as more of a lark than anything else, as soon as she'd sat down on it, she'd thought about the last time she rode a train over half a year ago, the fact that it had been so clear in her mind that it could be the last time she ever traveled on that path to and from Hogwarts. The place where everything had changed, really.

Maybe it was more important to her than she'd originally thought.

After the effects of the first brownie had subsided, Hermione had adamantly refused to take another, something about the swell of happiness only leaving her stomach feeling significantly lower than it had been before. By the time she sat on that train, all that remained was the slight buzz of alcohol, a concession Hermione had allowed herself mostly to be social. She sat down on the caboose, watching Harry walk on over to another girl standing far ahead, and smiling a bit for it, before turning to watch the retreating tracks.

Some time later, she laid down on the train, wincing at the slight discomfort of it, before staring up in wonder at the sky above, at the numerous stars that shone so clearly, marred only by the occasional ring of steam emitted by the train. One hand reaching up to feel the crisp winter air blow past, she sung to herself, under her breath.

"Weasley can save anything, he never leaves a single ring. That's why Gryffindors all sing: Weasley is our King."

Edited 2010-12-13 07:40 (UTC)

"No, no... Those aren't the words," he murmured, wedging himself into whatever space in the tiny train care not already occupied by one curly-haired Gryffindor. Luna was... somewhere nearby, which made him inexplicably happy. Right then, he wanted to keep her close to him forever and ever.

He wanted a lot of things just then, including butterbeer and pumpkin pasties, but none of those explained his need to climb in next to this girl, whom he remembered had once been his sworn enemy.

"I wrote them. I would know."

In spite of the soft, steady thud against Hermione's temples, the beer that still had her feeling warm and blanketed in spite of being only a shadow of what butterbeer had once been capable of, she turned to the side to look at Draco with an almost alarming amount of clarity. Perhaps she'd had enough time to acclimate herself to his presence, between the fact that he'd been one to find her on the beach and the various times she'd bumped into him at the party, one too small and confined to miss anyone familiar for the duration. As pathetic as it possibly made Draco out to be, even Hermione noted that she could recall very few times, if any, when the young man had been honestly happy. Not vindicated, not malicious, but content with the way things were, and that fact had her sighing as her temple dropped into her palm, eyes fixed on the blond and lips only pressing lightly with disapproval.

"You wrote the words, but you got them all wrong," Hermione replied slowly, with an exhale sharp enough as to almost be derisive. "So we rewrote it. You'd do well to learn the new lyrics, unless you'd prefer to continue spouting lies."

"They weren't lies until he somehow managed to pull a modicum of skill out of his arse at the last minute. How, I suppose we'll never know," he said, without the sting of his usual vitriol.

He was quiet for a moment, his hair whipping loose about his flushed face and stringy from sweat, then finally, he said, "It's strange, having the two of you here. 's like... one life bleeding into another."

Unfortunately for him, he'd had more than one brownie.

"He's always had the skill, he just needed to practice," Hermione insisted, voice growing slightly short with impatience, although why she couldn't be sure. Certainly, she hadn't been one of the people who expected Ron to amount to so much on the Quidditch pitch, even if she'd ended up being surely one of his greatest followers, just as she had been Harry's. There was simply something about Malfoy saying something to that effect, when he had the help of his father, of a far superior broom, that rankled her nerves as much as Draco ever did. "He worked... hard to make his way onto that team, and deserved it. Anyone can see that."

But she too fell silent along with Draco, calming down with the silence which stretched between the two of them, nose only wrinkling slightly when his hair whipped in her direction, a few flecks of perspiration touching her cheek, which she rubbed away with the back of her hand. (Or maybe it was just her imagination. It was still strange being in such close proximity to him at all.)

"It's all one life, you know," she told him quietly after she considered his words. "You can try and run or hide from your past, but your life is one continuous stretch. It won't be strange to have us around for long."

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Dated to 12/12, the wee hours of the morning

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