thicker than water | agnes o.

[Tennessee Ogden]

Start of term 1948-1948
On the Hogwarts Express

Tennessee’s new clothes felt stiff and uncomfortable.

Not that they were new, really. Like all of his belongings, the pants and jacket had belonged to Rhett long before they came into his care. The scratchy wool coat and strictly pleated trousers had barely been touched by the oldest Ogden boy, and Tennessee couldn’t blame him.

But Tennessee wanted to move, to let out all the nervous energy that bubbled up from his stomach to his chest. He wanted to jump and scream and run circles round the small train compartment, but the legs of his trousers were too tight and his coat too stiff for proper panic, so he settled with taking his excess energy out on Agnes.

“Hey, Agnes,” he called to his sister, seated across from him. A flick of his thumb, and his balled up train ticket flew through the air towards her face.

“You think you’ll get sorted into Hufflepuff?”

His voice was lazy and laced with mockery as he reclined in his own seat, propping his feet up on the empty spot next to him. He didn’t know what about Hufflepuffs made them the butt of so many jokes, but he’d heard a student on the platform say something similar to her brother, to the latter’s tearful protests.

“You seem like a Hufflepuff to me.”

[Agnes Ogden]

One foot planted on the floor, one foot planted on the seat, Agnes tugged up her socks in turn.  As she tugged the fine-knitted fabric up, her lips pursed--not in concentration for the act so much (it was a mindless thing, the tugging-up of socks) but for the motion of it.  It was a strange one, she recognized, and hard to describe; she focused on it, trying to suss out how to break it down into words, and settled on an image that was a bit like tying a shoe while sitting, only elongated.

It was strange way to pass the time, surely, and she had pulled her socks back into place at least four times already, but it gave her a measure of control she felt she deserved, with things the way they were.  She finished--again--and tucked her knees beneath her, brown eyes turning to look out the window.

A wadded ticket struck her temple, and the same eyes narrowed.

“Well, Tenn, you seem to me like a mess in his brother’s hand-me-downs, but I don’t rightly reckon they got a--” She tried the word out, testing it like toes in water.  “--house for that.”

Her tongue clicked feigned disappointment against the back of her teeth, and she turned her head to settle her brown eyes on her brother's hazel ones.  Out of all the pairs of eyes in the family, his were the ones that matched hers most closely--a fact about him that she appreciated and resented in equal measures.

“Might as well get off the train now, ‘fore we get to far out toward--”  Agnes paused.  Where, exactly, they were headed, she was not sure--someplace far off and likely cold, for all places here were frigid in her bones.  Tugging again at her sock, she let her words drop there.

[Tennessee Ogden]

“Well, Tenn, you seem to me like a mess in his brother’s hand-me-downs, but I don’t reckon they got a house for that.”

Tennessee shrugged off the insult with a chuckle, more than happy with the reaction he’d gotten from his sister.

“Aw, Agnes. Don’t tell me you’ve never worn nothing of Ida’s.”

New clothes were a luxury he’d never known, and it would be a right injustice if Agnes was exempt from hand-me-downs when he had to put up with Rhett’s scratchy wool. Although he’d gotten a new pair of shoes when they’d moved to Bantry: leather boots, clunky and ugly but wonderfully warm and dry during the cold winter months. They were propped up on the compartment seat now, shedding flakes of mud and dust onto the cushions, leather a little scratched but otherwise in good condition.

“Might as well get off the train now, ‘fore we get too far out toward--”

Her voice trailed off as she returned to playing with her socks. Tennessee glanced out the window. Families still milled about the platform, waving goodbye to children on the train. The last few students dragged their trunks onto the train, struggling with under the weight of their belongings. Owls in cages hooted and cats in baskets hissed back; strange mechanical clinking came from the train, and a heavy steam began to fill the platform.

“Might be too late for that now,” Tennessee noted, distress darkening his voice a shade or two. “Hey, where do you reckon we’re headin’, anyway?”

[Agnes Ogden]

He was right, of course.  Agnes ended up with hand-me-downs that were handed down, not just from Ida but from Ida then to Opal and then to her so that her dressed were usually taken too far out in the bosom and hemmed too short above the knee.  The quality of their clothes was something they seldom spoke of, something even sitting there as she was that Agnes knew was off limits to pick at, something that was a testament to the roiling of the nerves in her stomach.

Instead of saying sorry, she curled her lip, cocked her head to the side, and stuck out her tongue.  Tennessee always brought out the baser sides of her.

Again, her eyes drifted out the window, idle at first then drifting over faces, looking for one to pick at the same way she had picked at her socks or Tenn's coat.  Nothing caught her eye in particular among the sea of parents and children kissing tearful cheeks goodbye or the older students and their infinitely maturity, eager to head off to wherever it was they were headed.

“To hell in a handcart,” she supplied to her brother.  Her words weren’t kind but they were a little softer, a little slower.

“It’s something of a big secret, ain’t it?”  Over the summer, Agnes had done what reading she could, but it wasn’t much and it certainly wasn’t informative.  Even her train ticket listed no end-of-route but Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, though for all the girl knew that could be usual; this was her first time on a train.  She shifted her gaze, this time to her brother, and then quickly again to where his boots flaked hard-caked mud on the bench.

“Well,” she said, half of the mind to scold him for it, but she couldn’t muster the fight.  From somewhere forward of where they sat, she heard a whistle sound and her heart took off, racing up to some place in her throat and tightening her next words.  “You reckon it’ll take long to get to...wherever it is?”

[Tennessee Ogden]

“You reckon it’ll take long to get to… wherever it is?”

Agnes’ question hung in the air for a few moments as Tennessee contemplated the journey ahead. He’d never taken a train before; he’d never needed to travel farther than the occasional crossing of the river to South Carolina, the only other state he’d visited during his years in the states. Still, he ventured a guess that if a train was chartered to carry all the students to the school grounds, they had a ways to go. Not that he minded; the compartments were fancy, with sliding glass doors and plush cushions on the seats. He could get use to traveling like this.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass how long it takes,” Tennessee supplied. “As long as Joycelynn doesn’t find us here.”

As if to prove his point, he sunk lower into his seat. If Joycelynn managed to hunt them down, the trip would feel endless no matter how long it took.

[Agnes Ogden]

Agnes laughed.

If she had been then one to write down the way she did it, she would have written it something like this:

The Girl laughed, and it pulled out of her like teeth--extracted, sort of cutting, a little short in the center and jagged at the edges--and fell onto the floor with a hollow sound like breaking porcelain.

But she wasn’t (Agnes never wrote around Tennessee; she knew better than that), so it was just a strange sort of laugh, markedly different from the regular round sound of her usual laughter or the snorting, half-frustrated sort that her brother usually prompted.

“Oh, Lord,” she said, and there was that same breaking quality to her words too.  “Bless Joycelynn’s heart.”

The eldest of the Ogdens on the train, for all Agnes knew, had skittered off somewhere to find her own well-appointed compartment, to lavish on her own plush seat, for in her opinion this was the sort of place Joycelynn might lavish.  It made Agnes herself feel a bit like she was being strangled, and she was still laughing beside.

And then the train, accompanied with the high thrill of whistles and a plume of white steam, lurched beneath her like some large and angry iron animal, and the sound (broken though it was) stopped in her throat.  Agnes sucked in a breath, brown eyes wheeling wildly to her brother.

“Tennessee,” she said, pleading and like prayer.