Shocks And Surprises

It had been an unexpected surprise last night when Bertie had received a letter from his Head of House saying that she would be visiting the ministry of magic that next day and would be able to collect him and take him back to Hogwarts with her once her meeting was over. She hadn't pressed much about what the meeting could be about, Bertie wasn't aware that she once worked there although he could easily guess it had something to do with the marriage law that was being plastered all over the daily prophet.

It was lucky Bertie's trunk was already packed and ready otherwise he wouldn't have been able to enjoy his last night with his Mum. After almost two weeks with her Bertie was anxious to return to Hogwarts, there were more people to catch up with there and he was still on pins about what had happened with Snidget since he left.

At eleven o clock Professor Cooper had picked him up and then half an hour later after several apparation sessions Bertie was walking through the winged-boar gates, an irresistible smile sneaking across his lips. It made Amelia smile, or half-smile, she never did smile but Bertie knew she had a heart. He could tell. A little defeated, weakened over the years but there was still a strength inside of her. Resilience.

At twelve o clock the booming bell would sound the end of classes ready for lunch, but rather than waiting half an hour for classes to end and venture into that Great Hall to experience the beautiful cooked shepherds pie the Ravenclaw hurried along to history of magic whilst Amelia sent his belongings up to the dorm with a swish of her wand. He was half an hour late but that didn't bother him, Professor Binns wouldn't notice his arrival anyway - the ghostly Professor never noticed a thing. Bertie had once raised his hand to ask a question and the ghost completely ignored him absorbed in his drone and lecture notes.

Professor Binns may not have noticed the return of one of his students but Bertie's peers did. The fourth year Ravenclaws simply stared at him, then at each other, then once again at Bertie. Why were they looking as though they had seen a ghost? They didn't mutter to each other but when the Ravenclaw took his usual seat next to the window besides Frank Fountainberry his dorm mate edged slightly to the right away from Bertie. It wasn't as if he was still infected, besides he'd made sure that nobody was aware he had an infection, especially the mutated form that had kept him from Hogwarts for almost four months.

It was an uncomfortable less and Bertie was glad when the booming bell sounded at twelve o'clock. Finally he could address the awkwardness, not that he was an open boy but they were his dorm mates after all and if something had happened or if they held a grudge against him then it really did need sorting. Moreover Bertie was curious as to who had been caring for Snidget. Although after collecting his empty parchment (keeping up with Binns had been harder than he could remember, maybe because he'd been late?) the rest of the class had hurried away from him, casting terrified looks over their shoulders as they left the door. Perhaps he wouldn't go to The Great Hall but the Clock Tower and write. That's where he always went when saddened and needed time to himself - as if he hadn't had enough. This wasn't how Bertie had wanted his return.

Last to leave the classroom, even Binns had drifted off somewhere, Bertie quietly shut the door behind him and walked to the window across the corridor from the classroom. Sleet. Wind. Grey clouds. Talk about a pathetic fallacy.

It was like a car ride.

Rika liked cars.

It would seem improbable, especially considering her history with fearing anything with four walls and having a propensity to locking you in. It was why Rika still slept on top of Ravenclaw Tower, amidst the wind and sleet and cold. It was open, and when you tilted your head back to watch the stars, the sky seemed so vast that it could swallow you whole. It reminded you that your existence compared to this gigantic monster of a universe was tiny, negligible, worthless almost.....irrespective of what you did. Everyone's existence. The thought was strangely comforting.

But Rika liked cars. Because even if you were locked within a metal box; the box was still moving. And when the window panes were rolled down, and you stuck out your head, the wind ripped past your hair and brought tears to your eyes- blurring everything.

Her life was like a car ride.

Speeding down a long, endless road, with no twists or turns as far as the eye could see. So fast, that the trees and the fields and the little white houses all blurred in together, so fast that you might as well have been stuck in one place for all time. Every morning dragged when she opened her eyes, every night stretched when she closed them to sleep. She was sleeping through her life, and no one cared to prod a finger on her shoulder to wake her up.

The magic of the castle had faded. Witches and wizards, boys and girls, teachers, students....everything seemed to mingle into one. An Acceptable on every essay, a Poor or Dreadful on every practical- the Ravenclaw Head of House had almost grown too tired of reprimanding her now. Or maybe the teacher had left in protest of the new decree.....Rika didn't quite remember. The smart Ravens derided her, thinking her stupid- the popular ones couldn't quite stand the state of her hair. Even watching the stars seemed pointless because they would remain..and she would leave, and she didn't quite understand why she hadn't already, except maybe she hadn't the energy to. It was like she had allowed her eyelids to fall for a second, eyelashes shadowing her cheeks; and in a blink the world had flowed and changed around her and a year had passed- and everything remained the same.

Today, Rika had pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast. She attended Runes, skipped DADA, and spent lunch in the library, scratching patterns on the table and staring out of the window, kicking her feet on the chair. The bell rang for another period, and another, and the sun had set before Rika could bring herself to stop the monotonous swinging of legs and get to her feet.

Nostradamus alighted on her shoulder the moment she stepped out of the library door. His thick, pointed talons dug into her shoulder as she dragged her feet up the stairs, making for the First Floor corridor. A river of young students seemed to be flowing out of the History of Magic classroom, parting seamlessly the moment they reached her. They had been here long enough to know to give the empty-eyed young girl with the raven seated on her shoulder, a wide berth. The girl too drifted along.....until the figure of a young boy, with a curly mop of hair seated unsteadily on his head, staring out the window- caught her eyes.

She had to work her throat for several seconds, before she could unstick it. Her vision seemed to be tunnelling before her. Her lips quivered, before moving imperceptibly. "Get him here now."

The black raven spread its wings, the feathers brushing past her cheekbone, and took to the air- winging down the corridor.

Long minutes passed before her knees had the courage to bear her weight forward. One step. One step at a time.

A bare rasp from an unused voice. ".......Bertie?"

Bertie continued to stare through the window, the rain dampening his emotions even further. How could everyone look at him as though they'd seen a ghost? Professor Binns hadn't done anything, then again he never noticed anything, but still people who'd he'd shared a room with for three years had simply scuttled away from him after class. Perhaps they had actually found out about his illness and believed him to still be contagious? That was exactly why he hadn't wanted people to know about the infection, in case they gave him special treatment and in this case ignored him altogether.

The sound of his own name brought him back from his thoughts. Turning around he came face to, well, chin with someone he'd once spent an hour or so with in the greenhouse. That's where the two of them met, over a pleasant conversation about the flutterby bush and it's alluring scent. Erika Dixon. She was one peculiar girl, but to Bertie she was cool. She shared his interests in writing and reading, enjoyed being creative and wasn't all that popular. Her popularity had rose over the year thanks to her feud with Henrietta Finch but now it had settled down and reach equilibrium.

'Erika!' Bertie gasped, a genuine smile etched onto his face again. 'It's so good to see you again, how have you been?' He asked eagerly as if nobody believed him to be dead. Finally someone who was glad he was back, or at least acknowledged his return!

Miracles.

It wasn't like some life changing event had embittered her. It was a tiny kernel of practicality inside a Utopian nut, a small bit of Reid inside all the Rika. She never had believed in Santa Claus. Or Wee Willy Wonky or the ghosts that lived in the cypress trees that littered their neighbourhood. Except once. Once.

She was vaguely aware of her knees hitting the ground, of her fingernails scrabbling uselessly against the stone slabs. She was aware of it as one might be about a fly twitching on their shoulder, aware of the breaths rattling inside her chest that were growing progressively deeper and harder - lungs expanding and contracting uselessly, clasping and cloying for air that would never be enough.

Miracles.

She'd never believed she'd see a miracle.....and yet at the same time, the hope of a miracle was the only thing keeping her alive. She was seeing one now. In those sparkling, young eyes that were thought would remain forever empty ; in those flushed cheeks that were supposed to be struck down by the pallor of death. Bertie was standing before her.... talking,  living, breathing. Vivianna would be so happy.

This couldn't be the miracle of her life.

Vivianna would be so happy.

This couldn't be her miracle. Because while Bertie walked back into the realm of the living..... Barbara stayed dead.  Cold, rotting.... six feet below the ground.

She hadn't known water could burn so. It burned now, laden down with salt, searing its way past her eyelids, scorching trails of lava down her face. Her throat was burnished sandpaper, her tongue a swollen, worthless mass of muscle. And a part of her that wasn't encumbered by weariness....resignation....eradication.... raged.

Vivianna would be so happy.

It wasn't fair. It was never... ever fair, dammit. Vivianna hadn't been placed in the same cradle as her adoptive brother. She hadn't seen his every laugh, every sob, every hopeful dream, every crushed silence. She hadn't talked to him from morning until night, twenty four hours of companionship, till the eyes fell half closed in sleep and the voice grew hoarse ; but the conversation never stopped. She hadn't felt all of her wither and die on the day she lost her twin..... twin..... other side, other half, the only half. She hadn't revoked magic...... companionship...... happiness, ever since that day. She hadn't spent her every waking moment since four years talking to a voice that didn't exist, and hoping for a miracle.

"... We... " A slight clearing of the voice, that seemed to echo from ripped vocal cords. ".. The... students.... your sister..... we thought......"  A small, broken sort of silence. "We thought you were... dead."

Bertie blinked, staring oddly at Erika as she merely stared at him as though she had seen some sort of ghost, a phantom, as though she were staring at a miracle. Perhaps the fellow fourth years hadn't been the exception, maybe everyone was aware of his condition, aware he had been infected with the most deadly of deadly diseases. Great. If this was how Erika was reacting how would Vivianna react? Would she acknowledge him or would she too keep her distance?

The... students.... your sister..... we thought... Thought what? That he was never going to return? That he had left Hogwarts forever? That he was going to be isolated in a room at St Mungo's and be eternally infected? Then his answer came...

Dead.

The word, that one word, took Bertie's breath from him. His eyes flicked slightly to stare at his shoes whilst his eyebrows furrowed and a lip quivered.

Dead.

They believed him to be dead. They thought the infection had killed him. It wasn't a tremendously horrific idea, after all the last time they'd seen or heard from him was when he was been whisked away to St Mungos - even the Hogwarts nurses had believed him to be dead. But... But he wasn't. Hadn't any of them thought to ask the Professors, Bertie hadn't wanted anyone to find out he had a rare, mutated, contagious, possibly-apocalyptic infection. But dead? Had the Professors decided that was the best solution, rather than lie about the extent of his illness, to tell the students that he was dead? Or maybe people just presumed he had fallen from grace and been lay to rest in the earth?

'Dead?' He repeated, returning his stare to Erika. Erika who was in shock at the sight before her. 'Dead.' Bertie repeated, more to himself than Erika.

Then... A smile. A giggle. A purse of the lips to try and not let out a great gasp of laughter.

His house mates, Erika, Vivianna they all thought he was dead?

Unable to contain his laughter Bertie let it all out. The more he laughed the harder it was to stop. The more he looked at Erika's face of surprise the harder it was to stop. The image of his fellow housemates edging away from him in History of Magic made it harder for him to stop.

Bertie simply stood there, bent over holding his stomach, laughing at how crazy this seemed.

Vivianna was in the potions lab. This was a surprise to approximately nobody. She tried to avoid the labs as much as possible, but sometimes her feet brought her there anyway. Whenever the teenager wasn't paying attention to her steps, she'd end up standing before a caldron. Sometimes the witch would even have laid out supplies before registering what she was doing. Every pore of her body longed to brew.

It was rare that the Slytherin ever allowed herself to do so. It would be far too easy if she did, far too tempting, to brew the potion that she'd poured down the drain. The potion she'd relied on for so many years. The potion she was still fighting cravings for. Her potion. Her weakness. Her near-fatal flaw.

The girl had gotten colder, she was certain. People she'd previously been decently friendly to, were now lucky to get a nod of recognition. Vivianna had been changed. The witch wasn't certain if it had been Bertie's death, or her love for Reid that had changed her. If the redhead were to think about it, she'd certainly say that it was both. Vivianna wouldn't think about it, however. Couldn't. It hurt too much.

Bent over a caldron, the Slytherin carefully stirred her half-finished batch of Veritaserum antidote. Removing the rod and setting it to the side, Vivianna allowed the brew to rest for a short while. It would make the potion more potent. There was no real reason for her to be brewing the antidote, she didn't need any. The girl had chosen it for its complexity. The potion was just hard enough to make Vivianna concentrate, for her to get lost in the brewing process, without being so hard that she'd need to be in top shape to create a working end result.

Carefully adding three moondew petals, Vivianna winced slightly. She'd accidentally bent her pinky, and the action had sent a spark of pain down the finger. The Slytherin was pretty sure she'd fractured it, but the injury wasn't bad enough to go to the Hospital Wing for. Bertie or Zane, maybe even Reid, would tell her to stop being stupid if they knew. They didn't though, weren't aware of how badly Vivianna was taking care of herself. The blisters on her finger were a perfect example. The witch would play with her ring whenever worried or stressed, but Vivianna had twisted her ring around her finger so much recently that blisters had formed. The Slytherin had barely noticed, lost inside her own head as she was.

A winged shadow flicked past his head, and Reid blinked.

He had been.....he.....he was on the second floor corridor. Standing by the thick-paned window, feeling sunlight bleach out his skin. Tracing the frieze on the sill, with fingernails now coated with dust. Yet at the same time, not quite sure what....he’d been doing.

A muscle twisted in his jaw, flickered beneath the skin in an expression of distaste that happened too, too frequently now. Lack of clarity wasn’t something appreciated. There was no fog weighing his mind, no discernible reason for every time his eyes wandered off the words on a page and into the middle distance, no justified cause for every time he had to consciously think and remember and incantation while his wand hand trailed off in a forgotten movement. Nothing wrong except this.....unease which had settled into his gut like a permanent fixture.

It crawled around his skin as restlessness that refused to let him sit someplace for too long, curled about his chest in a vice grip that demanded something which was yet unknown, made his unrelenting will power and stubbornness rage and twist and spit in anger but proved ever elusive to its control. Because he had always known, hadn’t he? Always known his own chinks, had been able to pinpoint his own weaknesses and then rip them off, fling them to the side like dead leeches.

Fingers tightened, digging into the frieze, gouging out cement and stone. This problem was simpler, and in its simplicity all the more hateful. He had no f*cking idea what was wrong.

But there was no time for that, because familiar talons had already hooked onto the frieze that his fingers had been abusing, and beady black eyes stared back at him. Anyone who thought animals were incapable of thought had clearly not met the right one, because the raven didn’t need words. It merely stared, then took off towards the direction from where it had come, and Reid’s feet followed without question.

A staircase down, a turn to the left, and Nostradamus stopped abruptly; a dark shadow hanging in the air. Past the black feathers, grey eyes fell on two silhouettes outlined against the brilliant spring sunlight- one gangly, thin girl fallen to her knees, one short, tousle-haired boy leaning back his head and laughing. The laugh and his pulse: entwined together in a mindnumbing melody, thrumming in his ears. The heart beat and the boy laughed, and his eardrums were barely sufficient to hold back all the blood which threatened to spill forth. Wipe him of every last dreg of red.

Then awareness of his limbs set in, quivering in impending motion, his knees locked, back turned.....and he ran.

Sprinted down corridors knocking down teachers and students indiscriminately, shrieks and piles of parchment fluttering into the air in his wake, slid down the banisters of hovering staircases, leaping across four steps at a time, skidded around sharp turns and winding corridors with a speed that sent the world’s balance teetering off its edge- and the restlessness gathered in his blood and sang because this...this unerring focus was him, this quietened some of the unease, and he didn’t even know what this was as long as it was still there. Sight blurred, hearing faded into nothing- until the dungeon door banged open, Vivianna stood before her cauldron, eyes half-closed, and the fire in his veins could stand it no longer.

Reid crossed the room in three quick strides, iron-hard fingers closing over her wrist in a punishing grip and turned to pull her along. Maybe she had lost weight, maybe she wasn’t dragging her feet, maybe she wasn’t actively trying to resist being dragged by force to wherever it was he was taking her- but he barely felt a backward force as he tugged her back through the path of destruction he had already left in the corridors. If she asked questions then he didn’t hear it, because there was no time for explanations, for words, for news, for....anything, except she needed to know. Right bloody now.

The first floor corridor approached, the History of Magic classroom door creaked noisily in the wind, and Reid relinquished the grip and shoved her forwards, air searing through lungs. For a second, everything seemed too still, the excess adrenaline struggling to find an outlet- then hazel eyes, glistening in the bright morning sunshine with something more than just moisture, met his from across the corridor.

I know. I know.

Bertie continued to laugh for another twenty seconds whilst Erika stood by him. Then, it stopped, in an instant. The idea that everybody believed him to dead was no longer a laughing matter. To his peers Professor Binns hadn't been the only ghost in the history of magic class. It was... unnerving.

Throughout his final recovery period at home Bertie had been anxious to see Vivianna, surprise her. If only he had wrote to her, if only he had explained what was going on. Some surprise this was going to be.

Hey Viv, so it turns out I'm not really dead I've just been ill all this time. But hey I'm back and better than before!

Come to think of it, surely if Vivianna had been aware he was alive then she would have wrote to him whilst he was at St Mungos? Even if he hadn't responded wouldn't she have wanted to know how he was doing? Insisted on knowing how she was doing? The more Bertie thought about it the more real it was slowly becoming. His eyes rounded and the filtering light through clouds outside gave them a glassy appearance. Vivianna thought he was dead.

Vivianna. The red head herself had appeared with Reid Dixon by her side. Clearly Erika had messaged him and he'd gone for the Slytherin but... Bertie gasped and raised his fingers to his mouth. Vivianna Varnes wasn't the same girl he'd left behind. She was different, tired looking and her hair slightly unkempt. There were blisters on his fingers and her eyes were polluted with pain.

'Viv.' Bertie whispered. The Ravenclaw had intended to whisper but his throat was dry and his words caught in his mouth. 'Viv!' The Ravenclaw ran past Erika, ignored Reid and found himself crashing into Vivianna and embracing her in a hug. Her hair wasn't its usual sheen but it smelt the same. Blood didn't run thicker than water. Vivianna was his sister and right now she looked like she needed a hug as much as Bertie needed reassuring this wasn't one big nightmare.

She had no bloody clue what was going on. One moment she was brewing, and the next Reid was dragging her forcefully out of the room and down the corridor. Just as Vivianna had managed to wrap her mind around what has happening enough to try and yank her arm back, the redhead caught a glance of Reid's face. She'd never seen a look anything like it on his features before. The teenager would have never thought it possible for the wizard to look so serious and determined, without even a hint of a smirk in sight. So the Slytherin girl didn't fight him, allowing herself to be pulled along even though Reid was wrenching her arm something terrible. She didn't dig her heels into the stone, and make some snappy comment about not needing to rip her arm out of socket to get her to follow, or that someone with a vocabulary like his should be capable of a simple sentence of explanation. Vivianna didn't do any of this, keeping quiet and trying not to imagine what could have put a look like that on Reid's face.

Stumbling through the entranceway of the History of Magic Classroom, Reid may not have pushed her hard but she was out of breath and not all the coordinated even on the best of days, Vivianna clutched at the wall momentarily to prevent herself from falling over. And then, she saw him. Bertie had his hand raised to his mouth, face morphed into an expression that was so very him that it took away what little breath she had left.

Seconds later Bertie was crashing into her, forcing the Slytherin to take a step backwards into the wall at the force of it. "Merlin, Bertie!" the witch exclaimed, words muffled into the Ravenclaw's hair. Arms wrapping around the younger teen without a second thought, the redhead squeezed tightly, smile pulling at her slightly dry lips.

Just as she was about to say something more, Vivianna caught sight of Reid. Carefully unraveling herself from the hug, because no matter what happened she would never intentionally hurt her little brother, the teenager took a step away from Bertie. If the smaller student was Bertie.

Smile melting off her face like hot wax, the redhead turned to face Reid, expression now completely neutral. Vivianna was no fool, she knew there was a reason she'd fallen for Reid. The wizard was capable of understanding and challenging her like no other. She would trust him with her life. She was trusting him with her secrets. She was not, however, fool enough to trust him with her mental well-being.

If Reid had somehow fabricated this, Vivianna didn't know what she would do. It was possible that Reid was trying to help her, give her closure or some such rot. It was equally possible that he was trying to push her, or hoping to see her break. Unable to help herself, a seed of hope planted itself in her mind, even though the Slytherin knew better than to hope until she had the facts. Bertie had been dead. Vivianna had seen the body with her own two eyes. Unless... she hadn't seen the body for days after she'd heard of Bertie's death. She had hardly been sleeping or eating, meaning that she could have been seeing things. Her energy-deprived brain could have thought it saw a dead body where there was only a sleeping one. The teenager didn't think she's taken any potions that night, but Vivianna had to admit to herself that hallucinations could have been induced by those easily enough.

There were many ways to impersonate another human. Reid was strong enough to hold up a full-body glamour for a few minutes if he tried, and polyjuice was easy enough to find in Knockturn Ally. But Erika was here, and silent so far. Having lost Barbara herself, the redhead doubted that the Ravenclaw girl would condone such a cruel trick.

"Reid," Vivianna forced out, "if this isn't real, you tell me now." She sounded like glass, hard and sharp, but translucent and so easily shatter-able. There was a beat of silence, where nothing could be heard but the students' heavy breathing, and Vivianna sealed up in all the time it would ordinarily take her to blink. "You tell me NOW, DAMNIT!" she screeched, completely ignoring the others in the room and blind to everything but the answer she was awaiting.

((OOC: God. I never saw that Kitty had replied to this topic. I'm so, so, so sorry guys.....you'll probably not want to go on with this thread anymore, but I owe it a post. Sorry again!))



The moisture was gathering at the corner of her eyelids, the noon sunshine seeping through the dusty windowpanes refracting off the transparent sheen. The blue of her eyes was brighter for it, bright, carpeted with a layer of salty liquid that refused to coalesce into drops; as stubborn as their owner, clinging and clinging and downright refusing to fall.

And in that crystalline water, Reid saw himself. A small, black image mirrored in her pupils. It was like staring through a looking glass.

If I could give you one gift under the sun......I would give you the gift to see.....to see yourself as others see you....so that you may know-

Know that to see yourself was to see others. That the same hate, the same derision, the same dark-tinted spectacles with which you saw the world, was a two-way looking glass. That others saw you through the same barrier, and judged you through the same, and no better.

It was one thing.to be uncaring. To truly give nothing about the opinions of the world. It was something else entirely to see past the mind of the girl standing two feet away, hoarsely screaming at him, a mind so like to his own- and find himself......demonised.

It was no great chore to understand what she was implying. What she thought he had done. Had done in spite of knowing better than anyone else in the world, being acquainted with the pain of losing a.........It wasn’t just lack of expectations. It was.....what she thought.......what she saw in him.......it went past bastardliness. What she saw in him, expected of him, it was......

Inhuman cruelty. A voice in his mind spoke, quietly. Inhuman.

Glass and stone, the thought fleeted across Reid’s mind, flashed past his granite eyes, even as he stared at her own. Glass and stone. She was glass right now, and all it would take was a single, viper-strike for her to shatter. A single flicker of the lashes, a single curl of the lip, a soft word brushed past the shell of her ear about how the human mind was so easily fooled....and she would be lost. Bertie would plead with her, clasp her hands, hold her cheek: and yet her smiles would be hollow, her laughs stilted, her mind striving to be with her Bertie and yet trapped, hopelessly entangled in the fear that he wasn’t real. Spiraling lower and lower till she was dashed to the ground, a burnt-out husk, a destroyed collection of splintered fragments.

Reid could do that. Become stone.

His feet moved forward. One step. Another. He knew the instant he stepped within five inches of her- his knuckles flexed in the air, skin heightened and pebbling over with goosebumps, ghost lips hauntingly fleeting over his jaw. He was a bare inch taller than her. It seemed too late to notice.

His right hand rose from his side, index finger outfolded, and its blunt nail traced its way from the outer corner of her eye all the way to the inner, scraping over the delicate skin. It probed at the corner of her eyelid, the place where crinkles probably burst out by the thousands when she laughed, and the salty water gave up its futile fight and released, clinging in turn to his fingertip. He wiped it away, letting her tear absorb its way past the roughened pad of his finger, sink into his skin.

“Your high opinion of me touches my heart.”

His hands sunk now, down, down on her shoulders, in a prising grip that was as hard as she expected it to be. He turned her around, inch by inch, till his chin was a centimetre over her shoulder, and his lower lip brushed her earlobe when he breathed.

They could see Bertie now, both of them, gold sunlight lingering on the bronze curls of his hair, a solid apparition casting a real shadow on the wan pool of light that bathed him. And he could glance back, and see Rika too, claw-like hands digging into her thighs, still on her knees because of course she didn’t have the strength to get up. But then she lifted her chin, and for a second, sunlight caught across her face too, illuminating sickly skin and darkened eyebags, above which hazel eyes glowed.

And another face flickered beneath his eyelids, blonde hair and healthy complexion and hazel eyes, and Reid let his breath loose, slithering past her ear right into her mind. “He’s real.”

And his hands let her go, because there was nothing else left. Familiar talons sunk their way past cotton and skin, hooking into his shoulders with pain that kept his mind clear, sane- and Reid glanced into the cold, flint-like eyes of his familiar. He turned, mind wiped blank, and walked, feet hitting against the floor in soft echoes that seeped meaninglessly into his ear, leaving the light behind. He wasn’t a creature of sunshine anyway. The gold light was metallic heat against his skin, the brutally honest rays casting his hair blacker and eyes colourless, paring the lines and shadows back from skin and bone. He was a child of storm, meant to walk in acid rain that purged and night that swallowed everything. Not here.

But something seized his wrist, and he stilled. His head looked to the side, and Rika was still on her haunches, leaning her head behind on the hard, stone wall. She was still looking ahead, looking at the reunion of brother and sister with caked, drying tear tracks burnt across her cheek- but her fingers around his wrist were deceptively strong, even if they were attached to a bird-boned wrist that looked fragile enough to snap with the slightest tug. Her lips weren’t flickering.

Reid didn’t free his hand. He didn’t even try. He stood, without words, without thought- watching two people reclaim their rightful happiness, while his sister held on to his hand.