back when i was 11 | iglu

[Tallulah Sloe]

End-of-Term 1949
Hogwarts: The Courtyard
Perhaps Late Afternoon,
After Rain

“There you are.”

She said it like she was carrying on a conversation from earlier (she wasn’t) or like they had plans to meet (they didn’t), calling it in her loud voice from the stone arch-type cut-out (she didn’t know the word for it, but felt like ‘stone arch-type cut-out’ was good enough) as she rounded the corner into the courtyard, feet clacking fast and loud against the flagstone.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

This, at least, was true--no caveats required, no parenthetical thoughts to herself as she stomped forward.  Beneath her feet, the remainder of the pooled rain scattered, cutting a wide berth for the red Wellingtons that should have muffled her steps but did not.  They felt more rushed than usual, those steps, and that said something because the girl was consistently a blur of motion or a feeling of needing to be all places at once.  She wasn’t sure why, but it felt important that she be quick, like something of weight waited for her.  Against her back pounded her school bag and across her face was plastered a frenzied sort of grimace-smile--the same she often used for the current target of her attention.

Even through the colorless haze that had washed out the year, Tallulah Sloe could always find Ignatius Mallory.

“It’s like you’re hiding from me,” she scolded him as she came to a breathy rest beside him, one hand clutching a stitch in her side, the other reaching out to clutch the boy’s arm.  The bones beneath his skin felt as prominent as the first time she had laid hands on him and it soothed her.  After a few heavy breaths, she released her side and his arm, pressed her sweaty bangs to the side, and straightened herself.

“I got you a present,” she blustered, and then added, as an afterthought, “if now is a good time.”

[Ignatius Mallory]

His hair was damp. Not soaking or even enough to collect and drip down the sides of his face, mind you, but damp. Having just finished jotting down a few short phrases in the yearbooks of those he figured he'd-- one-- have the best chance of seeing in the future and-- two-- cared enough to want to, he needed a break. A need for fresh air and a moment to Not Think.

And Ig had always liked the rain.

“There you are.”

A beat, an exhale.

At this point, after all these years of knowing the girl, he wasn't even surprised any more. She always rounded on him as if she had a homing beacon placed on him that went off when he was most vulnerable, or at his peak of  his ability to interact socially.

The clopping of Lu's feet played a steadily rising tempo in announcement of her nearing presence and, eyes closed, he ran a hand up to wipe the mist of rain from his brow, to push short bangs back...

The Slytherin didn't turn around or reopen his eyes, not even when he felt the tug on his free arm.

“It’s like you’re hiding from me,”

A small snort, the closest thing to laughter he would get to, replied; no matter how much he had pushed her away, she always knew him. Part of  Ig had hoped he'd have been able to sneak away in the crowds later so he wouldn't have had to say goodbye to the girl-- the only one not in his year that he cared about hung around him, the only one he wouldn't be able to just get away with writing a few lines in a book to.

He should have known better.

"A present?" his brow furrowed slightly, but at her next words, he finally pivoted around on his heal. Somewhat surprised, he stared down at her, "What is it?"

[Tallulah Sloe]

“Well…”

To say that she got a present for the boy was a bit of a misstatement.  She hadn’t gotten it, for that implied buying it, going out of her way and likely out of the castle, considering different shops and then the goods they offered, standing and thinking and really weighing the options.  To get something would have required forethought and planning, neither of which the Sloe girl had ever excelled at and neither of which she likely ever would.

It would have been more accurate to say that she had made a present for Ignatius, because that was what she had done--at least in part.  Part of it she had borrowed from her housemate, Julian, because he wouldn’t miss it and because she liked to do such things to him from time to time to keep him on his toes.

Though it was too late to change her word, Tallulah wished then that she could; it, too, like the rush of her steps, suddenly felt weighty and important.  She herself always liked it best when people made gifts for her, like her father always did, whittling out little wooden animals and boats from scrap wood from his shop for her birthday or for no reason at all.  It was different, she thought, and better, but she didn’t have words to articulate it, so she rolled her eyes and whipped around in a flash of movement, missing his turn entirely.  When she came to front again, she looked up to meet his eyes, her own narrowing in exasperation.

“Oh, take it already, geeze,” she huffed, as if she had been holding the hastily-wrapped package out this whole time, like she hadn’t just produced it from her own bag.  She gave it hurrying shake.

It was wrapped in the latest issue of Spellbound--the last, she reflected dimly, that would have her friend’s name printed beside Editor-in-Chief--and this too she had borrowed, this time from the office of the boy to whom she now presented it.  Some re-printed comic strip that she never had the patience to read blinked back slap-stick humor at the pair of them as she held it out.

“Go on, go go.”

[Ignatius Mallory]

A crinkled rectangle was produced and held aloft for Ig to take. He hesitated for the briefest of moments as he stared at his newspaper being used as a wrapping, briefly reminding him that he still had not chosen the next student to lead the team in the coming years. The thought was pushed back once more, like it had been all week, because there was simply no one he liked or trusted enough to do it right-- not that he had done that well himself.

“Go on, go go.”

Rolling his eyes, Ig gingerly took the thing, eyeballing the girl a moment as if to winkle out some kind of hint before pulling the paper off. It was upside down in his hand, a silver frame with a fastening up top for hanging or a stand along the back for propping up.... When he turned it around, his own face stared at him from behind glass, malformed and too-large for its stick of a body, drawn in crayon. A green shirt proclaimed his Slytherin-ness, while another figure stood much shorter and in red beside him-- Lu herself.

If he hadn't had received so many of these damn drawings in the past, both personally and for assignments for Spellbound, he wouldn't have known otherwise.

In the past he had tossed them. Each and every one. It had gotten to the point where he had started having to get creative with where to dump them-- in the pages of thickly dusted library books, as linings in the owlry cages, stuffed into suits of armor... He had once put a handful in the mouth of a gargoyle, only to have the statue spit them back out and curse him in a foreign tongue.

Despite it all and despite himself, Ig found himself smiling. A little thing, quirking up the corners of his mouth, before he cleared his throat and brought back his usual scowl, but his tone was softer then it had ever been.

"And where, exactly, do you think I'm supposed to put this?"

[Tallulah Sloe]

Brown eyes went wide as his straw-like fingers carefully pried open the newsprint, wider still when she saw that the frame was upside down--it had to have been her fault, she hadn’t even thought of such a mistake happening, didn’t even note which way the comic had been facing when she had wrapped it and was foolish not to have, not to have made sure she handed it over right-way-up; they didn’t relax either even as the blonde boy smiled, though some place in the middle of her recognized it as rare and to be remembered for later.  Now, however, she felt suddenly cold and a sort of sweaty that had nothing to do with her fast pace on the way here.

Ig always made her feel good, like he was her big brother or secret boyfriend or some kind of moody angel looking after her from afar or from near-by when she could wrangle away some of his time.  But now--now, as she stood, her eyes still wide and looking up, her mouth gone a little slack from lack of movement, her breaths still coming fast--now she felt a little bit like a Very Important Piece of her had come out of her chest and was simply hovering there between them, small and glowing and vulnerable, and like Ignatius’s next words could cause it to collapse.

They did not.

“You can put it with your other ones,” she said, for over the years she had inundated the boy with a small forest’s worth of papers.  Despite the dry sound of her voice, she did not doubt for a second that he had kept every last one of them.  One, in particular, struck her.  “With your first one, maybe, the one I gave you on that first day, when you were eating pancakes, back when I was eleven.”

As her words had drawn to a close, they had taken on a flat sound not unlike the pancakes that Ig Mallory had eaten on the day in question and her voice, for once, quieted to a whisper.

“You can put them both wherever you’re going to go,” her small voice said, and the small, glowing, vulnerable part of her cracked, and in a slow rush so did Tallulah, still-wide eyes going wet first in the middle and then trickling out of the outer corners.  Her shoulders did not shake.

“Where I can’t be there for you.”

[Ignatius Mallory]

“You can put it with your other ones,”

Inwardly he cringed, glad for his stoic blank-faced demeanor for once, doing his best not to show a hint that none of them had survived, really. Well, except the one she mentioned-- the first. That might have snuck under the radar, placed in the book he had been reading at the time, to be forgotten, so unaware of the thousands that would follow it...

But his thoughts wavered as suddenly he realized things were too quiet, his eardrums not vibrating as violently at the shrill sound of the girl's voice per usual. She had started to whisper and Ig found himself having to lean in-- for what had to of been the first time ever-- to hear her.

“You can put them both wherever you’re going to go,”

"Tallulah?"

“Where I can’t be there for you.”

Ig watched as thin streams of tears trickled over her cheeks, and he froze. Was she... Was she seriously crying right now? Wide eyed, the Slytherin looked over his shoulder in a panic, looked around the courtyard for someone he might be able to use as a buffer. Something, anything, to scrape this sudden wad of emotions off on.

Alas, he was left on his own, and Ig gritted his teeth.

"There there, Lu," he spoke unsurely. his arm stretched out to pat the girl's shoulder with the tips of his fingers, because he refused to step closer, "You can always... owl me?"

His face dipped from cringe to frown, his tone dripping with self contempt.

"It's not like I'm actually going anywhere."

[Tallulah Sloe]

It wasn’t the same--

“It’s not the same!”

--and she knew it, had been in her own small way dreading it the whole term.  It had been written in the shades of her sketches, their voluminous numbers decreasing in frequency as the months had drawn on and their subjects seldomly depicting the two of them together, to speak nothing of their morose blue and gray pallets.  Beside, and she thought it stubbornly, it wasn’t picitures or letters that the bony boy needed, it was Tallulah Sloe herself; she couldn’t fit on an owl.

“I can’t fit on an owl!”

Tallulah did not have an owl--

“And I don’t even have an owl!”

--other than Stephen, the old school owl whom she had befriended her first year, and she hadn’t seen him in a few weeks.  What if Stephen, like Ignatius, had completed his time at Hogwarts and would be moving on to better, Tallulah-less things?  The girl shook her head, somewhat violently and suddenly defiant; he didn’t understand.

“You don’t understand!”

For once, she shrugged away from his touch, her birdlike shoulder rocketing up and rolling to get away from it.  Like his smile, she knew this too was an infrequent occurrence that she should hold close to her heart, but it felt a strange sort of way with which she was unfamiliar, and she wished for the life of her that she could get that glowing part of her back.  Obstinate, she shook her head again, tears still streaking down her cheeks as she took a Tallulah-sized step back, which was not much and quite a lot at once.

“Wherever it is you’re going,” she said finally, her thoughts and her words coming together as if some physical distance had given them room to breathe as one.  “I won’t be there, and I can’t send my love for you with an owl.”

She sucked in a breath, deep and shaking, and narrowed her eyes at the boy as if daring him to take a step closer, or to pat her, or to smile at her, or any number of the things that on a usual day would send the girl into a giggling, grinning, over-talkative tizzy.  If she had been the spitting kind, she would have spat; instead, she sucked a breath through her nose, snorting snot.

“You don’t understand,” she repeated, and when she did so, she came to understand why.  The words came out as they came to her.

“If I’m not with you, you’ll forget all about me!”