1
Avery muttered something sour under his breath, letting it wash over the pruned lemon balm. He stared at its leaves like he was thinking about it, though really he just avoided admitting he had already decided. "Fine."
2
Stealth flying was difficult. The sky was an infinite boundless space and given that, Calvin assumed it would have been rather easy to fly back in the wide expanse and follow from a safe distance, using the cloud cover and light as a way to keep himself hidden. But the trouble with that was falling behind meant Calvin's view of Orion was also obstructed. Trailing behind whilst mimicking the movements and path of the broom's flight was not easy. Beads of sweat ended up forming on Cal's forehead, his mind working on overdrive to try and predict where the Slytherin would go next. He dashed forward, and then turned in the opposite direction, disappearing behind the large mountainous rocks to prevent Alricsson from circling back and finding a follower. When he emerged out from under the fog, the boy was nowhere to be found. Calvin dove left and right, searching until he saw a small figure down below moving away from the stands empty handed. Calvin managed to wait all of two minutes, just enough to have Orion disappear from view, before landing onto the grass and hustling over to the benches where he saw the snake leaving from. He lifted one of the boards where he was confident the broom was only to find cobwebs and dust mites. "WHAT?" Calvin cried unhappily, moving onto the next part of the bench and lifting the wooden cover. He did this along the entire row until every wooden plank seemed to be torn apart. It was a mess, and he had nothing to even show for it. What was worse, each week, up until the last day of camp, Calvin would continue to search through the bleachers, lifting up a different row each time, at different times of the day and night, only to find the most disgusting things (Gum, it was almost always gum) but not a single trace of a broom. Long after he didn't have the comfort of his wand, after Marina Lamont stopped talking to him, Calvin persistent to no avail. end.
3
« Last post by Virtue Hir on 09/04/2018 at 17:40 »
Though she didn't mean it to, it escaped her, a kind of laugh that was only half a laugh and which was at least a quarter yelp, as up into his arms she went. It dissolved into the kind of laughter she so seldom laughed, a sort of low and sweet giggle, which she would have felt terribly embarrassed by if it had been produced under any other circumstance. As it was, she was much too busy delighting as she did in that up-ended feeling of having had two feet on the ground a half-second ago only to find them now dangling free in the air, at the sudden closeness of her face to Jeremiah's, at the feeling of his arms tensed beneath her.
Jeremiah was, of course, right. She didn't have to tell him, though. He already knew.
“All right,” she said instead, the noise of her laughter lingering kindly in her voice. Behind the curtain of her hair, she smiled, wide and white-teeth and red-lipped. Her arms, which had somewhere between there and here wrapped around his shoulders, tightened briefly, then relaxed to hang easily off him with her hands clasped, fingers knitted together, over his right clavicle, as if this was something that not only she had done a hundred times before, but that the pair of them did with frequency together.
She hoped it would be, that this was a secondary perk of her time spent writing at his desk. Virtue gave a sigh as if she was being terribly indulgent in letting him do this, though the sound of it did little to quell the glint in her eyes.
“Well, then, let's get moving,” she said, head jerking to her left--the direction of the roughly-cut path. “We don’t want to fall behind.”
4
It had been a long time since Felicity Wilding had laughed like that with him. A smile of his own caught at the corners of his lips, entirely unexpectedly, and his arms slipped from where they were folded across his chest to fall back freely to his sides. Talking to her, laughing with her, lifted a huge weight from his shoulders that he hadn't even known was there. He thought back to Aiden hanging about outside his cabin at the start of summer, and how he'd figured it was easier to let everything slide, to drop the grudge. He wondered whether it would be just as easy to do the same now, but couldn't quite bring himself to say anything out loud. The divide between himself and Fliss ran deeper than that between himself and Aiden. It had cut deeper, mattered more, been about them, rather than being a lingering byproduct of other people's chaos. Whatever lightness had buoyed him up a moment before slipped away; something tightened around his ribcage, his lungs, his heart. Jere sucked in a sharp breath. It was time for him to go, before he said or did something he'd regret. "I might have to send proof that I'm serious.""You let me know if ya need any help with that." He pushed away from the tree trunk, and shoved his hands back into his pockets. "I gotta get back to stuff. I'll see ya later, Fliss." It felt too like too sudden a goodbye, as he flashed her one last grin -- this one felt too forced to quite pass as genuine -- and turned away, but it was no less jarring than the rift she'd torn between them however many months ago it had been now. They were getting good at abrupt endings.
fin.
5
"Wouldn't she?"
Fuelled by Nashira's retreat, Vega grinned. It wasn't much of a victory -- neither of them had come out of this well, and she was still going to murder Aphrodite the next time she saw her brat of a cousin -- but she'd take what she could get.
"You've got five seconds to get out of here, or I'll tell her all about how I caught you behind the Quidditch shed with Patrick Primbleton."
6
"Bu' yer my friend too, Jer."To his credit, he didn't laugh in Aiden's face. Instead, eyebrows raised ever so slightly at the other's claim. It certainly hadn't felt like they were friends for almost the entirety of the last term, though, admittedly, that blame didn't rest entirely on Aiden's shoulders. Jeremiah had taken to avoiding him wherever possible, hoping that the Hufflepuff would get the hint after he had failed to show up for the planned prank -- and it had seemed to work, too, for the pair hadn't properly spoken in months now. He didn't want to admit it, but he'd missed Aiden Duncan. He was all too easy to hang out with, not even half as prickly as most of the other guys, if at all. And even now, after everything, he was still stubbornly insistent that they were friends. Maybe that meant that he was right, and they were friends, after all. "I'd do anythin' fer her an' she'd do th' same fer me, yeh know?""Yeah," he said, though he wasn't sure that he did know what that felt like. He thought of Cecelia again, and how maybe that could have been her, could have been them. He swallowed back the bitter taste of regret. "God, I'm starvin'." Then, in an unspoken acknowledgement of a friendship rebuilt, and as if they were just kids and not the teenagers that they had grown to be, "Race ya the rest of the way." Jeremiah Smallweed took off, knowing that Aiden Duncan would follow.
fin.
7
Trying to predict which way her emotions would turn next was practically impossible. He decided to roll with whatever she threw his way, because that would inevitably be easier than trying to anticipate Zoey Jones's next move. She was still pronouncing his name wrong, but this was met with no more than the slightest frown. Either she was doing it on purpose -- which meant that there was little point in trying to change her mind -- or she was incapable of pronouncing it at all. Maybe it was the accent. "Hackney," he answered, as he wondered which person she was about to leave hanging so that she could spend time with him instead. S'like, the crappy part of London." He looked at her for a moment, and watched as orange dripped and splattered onto the floor. "C'mon, then, if you want that ice cream." And he turned back the way he had come. Presumably, she would follow. Newt, he supposed, could wait.
fin.
8
She was sure she had it -- it was right there, inching closer and closer with the momentum of Marina's lunge. But as her hand moved, so did Cece's. Only, instead of yanking away or dodging the tackle as the Ravenclaw and her grabbing digits had expected, the hand and the wand it held moved, instead, closer, until they were right up against her shoulders, pushing her away. Marina was knocked backward. She fell to the ground with a soft thud muted by loose sand. Slightly rattled, she blinked up to meet Cecelia's gaze in the twilight. There was something fanatical about the Slytherin's eyes that made her heart skip a beat. And then it happened -- her wand came down on Bramston's knee and it felt like something inside her snapped in time with the cracking of splintering wood. "No!" She shrieked, her hand lifting uselessly as if it might still prevent the unthinkable from happening. Marina loved that damn wand. She still remembered her excitement when she'd first gotten it, too excited to wait to get to Hogwarts before she pulled it from her trunk to admire it almost every day. In shallow grooves all along the handle, it bore the scars of her everyday worries, etched out in fingernail cartography. Though she felt no physical pain, watching it break on the hands of someone so loathsome felt akin to Cecelia breaking one of Marina's limbs. "You bloody bi--" The rest of the word was lost in the scuffle as Marina hurried to her feet and surged forward once again. Her wand might be broken, but the least she could do was pick up the pieces. The least she could do was try to put them back together.
Fin
9
He let her walk away.
Well, it's not like he could force her to remain and continue receiving his preferred means of communication. He might have been able to coerce her, to say just the thing to keep her in place, but, when you were already winning by a landslide, it was time to catch the snitch and get it over with.
(This didn't have the same taste of victory. Sure, he'd won. He usually did. But there was a tone of resounding defeat that made it hollow.)
Instead, Orion chose to laugh. The cackling sort reserved for midway through comedy act when the performer had seemingly captured all the laughter you thought you had. He reached for another cigarette now that his evening, and summer, had been secured.
10
I love them!! Thank you so much!!!
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