Hogwarts School - Summer

The moment the words slipped free from her lips, there was a click—the sound of it all falling into place.

He was staring at a Dutch girl, and she was either a perfectionist, exceedingly on top of even her nighttime appearance, or that was a new lint-less sweater vest and neatly-pressed blue and bronze tie. It looked starchy still, her tie, without the usual wear of a year or two of constant washing and tying.

A million questions jumped to the forefront of his mind then, the most pressing of all why?

Why are you here, he wanted to ask first, but given her presence there—not just at Hogwarts but in the Hospital Wing on such an early night of term—and the potion she held in one hand, he knew better than to force an answer for the obvious. Instead, he swallowed all his prying questions in a honking bite of his sandwich and tried to play it cool.

Keyword: tried to.

But there was no helping the keen way his gaze seemed to delicately flit over each of her features, never lingering on one place for too long as if they—her features, her name, her accent—were something to be taken in and memorized all at once.

“Yeah, kinda,” he said between chews, “I’m from Rye—in England, not Scotland. Down in East Sussex, if you know where that is.”

He swallowed.

“It’s alright if you don’t. I’m from it and even I forget sometimes.”

Russell imagined his tiny, three-bedroom childhood home on Mermaid Street in Rye was nothing like what she had left behind in The Netherlands. She wouldn’t be too impressed by it if she was from one of those bigger Dutch cities with the towering, tightly-packed houses and canalled streets.

“Are you from Amsterdam? That’s the only one I know.”

She wasn’t British.

He heard it in the hesitation that split h—ey into two syllables; he heard it in the rounder-than-normal o of Mallory; he saw it in the way she refused to let herself sink into the pressed linens of the infirmary bed, every inch of her coiled and taut and wary.

She wasn’t British, she was something else entirely, something foreign and frightened, and she looked about his age. Nurse Ennes offered no explanation—no name, no age, no explicit ailment—perhaps believing he had caught the important parts from the doorway, or perhaps believing him sharp enough to figure it out for himself. He usually was sharp enough for that, but something about the scene he had walked in on had thrown him.

A tentative smile flickered, “That’s actually my last name.”

He rounded the end of her bed and claimed the empty one to her left.

“Nurse Mallory’s what they call me in here. My real name’s Russ—Russell.”

He seemed to remember the sandwich he held in his hands then. Instinctively, he extended one half to her in a wordless offering.

“Beef.”