Hogwarts School - Summer

"You're getting what?"

He heard her correctly. Rising from his rested position, bare chest against her soft mattress, Lyn gave her the most incredulous look he'd likely ever given someone. Mainly because he'd seldom offer anyone the ability to warp his presentation, even in the faint quiet that existed in the dark room they shared.

She repeated it as if the repercussions of what she was admitting to him weren't contradicted by what they had gotten into that evening and what had him lying there beside her in the first place.

"Not tomorrow, or anytime soon, but it's going to be arranged for me."

Lyn stared unblinking in the direction of her voice. The moon was dead that evening, leaving only the light stars and the faraway streetlight to be the only thing that lit her form for him to see. Still, he was quite sure she could feel the look he was leveling at her.

"What? Did you think we'd keep doing this forever? We're not teenagers anymore, Llywelyn."

He hated it when she used the entirety of his name. She knew that and used it anyway.

Processing everything in his mind had left him tumultuous. No, he did not expect them to keep doing this forever. And honestly, it took a lot of coaxing and manipulation on his part to even get here. Vesper had always been a constant. Whenever he felt that pinching need for companionship, that itch that he'd need someone else to scratch, he could depend on her to welcome him into her world and let him out the moment he could pick himself up from whatever depths his spirit had sunk into.

Lyn wasn't about to wait for the morning. He turned, shifting his hips into flipping his body away from her and rising off the bed in the same motion before he went about gathering his things.

She laughed.

All of it went unsaid. How often they looked into each other's eyes and realized the kinship that existed there. Mirrored spirits, too conceited to speak it aloud. The many times he'd stumble upon her door because he knew he could and how little they would speak on their lives, what was happening as if it hardly mattered in those moments when there were more pressing matters to get through. As if taking the time to brush past the shallowness of their engagements might ruin it, or at least take up time that could be put to better use.

For a second, he paused to think on whether he should toss his name as a suitor.

For a second, Lyn wondered if she was making the whole thing up. She was testing him, trying to find what they actually meant to each other when, in the last few months, he'd made his way to see her more often than he had in all the years that'd passed since they'd graduated.

For a second, Llywelyn Ridley Renn thought about what it would take for him to ever be happy and if this was where destiny had always been leading him. To this one chance, this one moment, to finally admit that he didn't have it all figured out.

He left without a word, leaving the key he'd forged when she'd gotten the place on a nearby table without shedding a second glance in her direction.