sixthiterationlogs | 002. I sat alone, in bed till the morning

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002. I sat alone, in bed till the morning - OTA (Part 1)

WHO: Draco Malfoy
WHERE: The Inn
WHEN: Spanning his arrival to the evening of Feb 13
OPEN TO: Everyone, second section closed to Pietro Maximoff
WARNINGS: Angry teenagers (will update as necessary)
STATUS: Mixed

01. I'm crying, "They're coming for me" -- OTA

The past week has been a blur. Draco felt like he was just drifting in a constant state of panic that things like hunger and exhaustion barely penetrated. He'd rejected every scrap of help he'd been offered, thinking himself more than capable of doing everything on his own. The problem was that he was far too accustomed to life with magic and now he had to try to get by without it at all, his wand gone the way of his robes, his heirloom ring, his family's reputation. He didn't even have his wealth or connections to fall back on. For the first time, probably ever in his life, he was putting in hard, physical labor. Unwilling to accept what everyone said, he was trying to prove that he could escape.

The first few days were focused on the fountain, as that's where he'd come in, but there was no way he'd be able to reach the bottom of that thing without so much as a bubblehead charm. One night when he was certain no one see, he may have attempted such a feat, out of desperation. Finally, he gave up, focusing his efforts elsewhere. But the forest proved just as frustrating and far more perilous. If he wasn't running into sheer cliff walls or getting completely turned around, he was finding that footing was as dangerous as the depths of the Forbidden Forest and just barely escaped grievous injury. Night after night, he dragged himself back to the village, always wrapped snugly in his peacoat, growing more and more disheveled and frazzled. He was not made for this life and was getting more and more irritable.

02. And I tried to hold these secrets inside me -- Closed to Pietro

Finally, on Monday night, Draco decided he would not live like this any longer. He wasn't accepting that this place was permanent but if he didn't find a base of operations, he was going to run out of internal resources and be useless in every possible way. Constantly throwing ones self at a problem without a real plan was the gryffindor way, and he'll be damned if he was going to keep it up. Regroup and re-evaluate. Not all was lost. This meant having a set place to rest every night. Somewhere to call his own, to rest and recharge.

In his exhausted state, he didn't realize that the lack of available room keys meant the place was fully occupied. So he went room to room, checking doors, checking rooms. Some were locked, some were clearly occupied even if no one was home. Finally, when he reached the door for room 11, he thought perhaps he'd finally found one. It looked like people had been there recently, or at least that it had been cleaned more recently than some of the houses he'd seen. But he didn't see so much as a backpack to mark it as taken, though he was just tired enough that it was easy to miss something.

Convincing himself that it was free to take, which wasn't difficult for someone with such a self-centered view of the world, he dropped his backpack on the floor and collapsed onto one of the two beds. He barely managed to kick off his shoes, not bothering with his coat, before he started to drift off. He'd come up with a plan in the morning.

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"Not according to Buzzfeed," he says, the words more question than answer--and when he tries to grasp the shape of it, it's like the stuffed doll in his room. He knows what Hufflepuff is, he just can't remember why. Why was there a quiz? What does a badger have to do with cooking for someone?

He puffs a breath through his teeth, just glad he's solved the immediate issue. The boy's shame makes enough sense in the context that he only leans past it, setting the bowl at the roots of the tree as intended.

For a moment, he hovers there, tracing the edges of the star once with his finger. He'd have to talk to Ren another time. "Come on, we'll move under the trees as much as we can, dodge some of the rain." The mud was unavoidable, but at least his boots have held up better than the rest of his clothes. His first steps out from under the branches squelch and stick to his feet, but he carries on, only a glance back to make sure the boy is following, instead of disturbing the space further.

For a fleeting moment, Draco felt like he understood why muggles looked at him so strangely when he spoke of things that were part of his daily life. Because "Buzzfeed" meant absolutely nothing to him. It was two random words smashed together that had no business being near each other. It almost sounded like a plant or a spell. Did it provide food for bees? Turn someone's food into bees? It could have been flies, too.

Trying to puzzle out what on earth it could mean, he just stood sullenly, waiting for Kira to finish with the grave. He follows when the other finally moves, only pausing briefly at the unsettling feeling of shoes in mud. For all the days in the damp forest and irritating rain, he still wasn't accustomed to such a revolting sensation.

"So are you going to explain what the bloody hell a Buzzfeed is, or aren't you?" he sneered at Kira's back. Maybe it was the other's school, he seemed just old enough that maybe he was only a few years out at most.

Kira snorts, barely audible over the squelch of their shoes, the sound of rain drizzling through pine needles and the winter-thinned canopy. It would be too much to ask that a young man who skulks around dark forests and calls him things like Hufflepuff under his breath knows what the internet is.

Rather than attempt the explanation, he wonders what would make sense to him, what explains the purpose without the context. "It's a bit like a magazine, it gathers up things people write elsewhere and makes lists or quizzes out of it. They had a quiz for Hogwarts houses."

It's as far as he manages before his mind loses the thread that should follow: why one had anything to do with the other, and where he's learned about a school of magic in the British isles. Perhaps his mother had wanted to send him, once upon a time, after her own mother had moved back to England. Before he'd slacked on both his public and private educations. "Did you--" he starts, the question forming in his mind as he lifts a wet branch and shakes the worst of the droplets free, pushing it aside and finally looking at the boy while he waits for him to carry through the path he's made them. "Did you go to Hogwarts?"

He isn't sure why the question feels ridiculous, impossible. The young man has the accent for it, and if he's tossing about house names like legitimate insults, Kira's sense of the world demands he be from the school or know enough about the internet to have taken dozens of personality quizzes.

The first thing that sprang to mind at the mention of a magazine with quizzes and the like was that trash rag the Quibbler. Full of nonsense, fictional creatures, and outlandish tales. The one and only thing they got right was one story, and of course it was on everyone's favorite golden boy. Perhaps Lovegood just finally got tired of being dirt poor and thought he'd get rich quick being a stupid rebel. For having a ravenclaw daughter he wasn't exactly smart. Then again, neither was she. He wouldn't past those idiots to try to come up with some quiz that could some how decide what house someone went in. That was preposterous.

Too wrapped up in trying to not sink into the mud and a little petty nonsense, like insulting other students, Draco started to feel a little bit better. Like some normalcy had been restored to the world. But it meant he almost missed Kira's question. He looked up, startled. He hadn't even considered Kira as being a wizard. Hadn't Graves said something about there only being the three of them--Graves, Draco himself, and that weird kid he still thought might be some sort of human-house elf abomination. Or was this one just keeping it all to himself?

"What do you think?" He snapped, not sure if he could give a straight answer. "Did you?"

Leaning into the branch to keep it steady, he keeps himself occupied stripping the needles from a twig at its tapered end. There weren't really pines outside the parks in Manhattan, and they hadn't been crowding up those either--it's strange to have the time, and the opportunity, to walk through a place like this. To notice how even the tree he'd buried Ren under, taller than the rest, was made up of a single shape, branching exponentially.

His mother would say they had power, and he slips a few of the needles into his pocket just in case. He hadn't gone anywhere to learn such things--he hadn't even graduated his perfectly normal high school. There were just the lessons handed down, distinguished from the tricks they did just for show. Things that had been warped by television and books so that, without the right flair, no one believed in them anymore.

He wonders what the boy might tell him, about an entire school for such things. Were there hard and fast rules, or did everyone just feel it out, the way he does? "I dropped out of Manhattan Village the last year, so, not really. Maybe if I'd gone to a magic school I'd have stuck it out. Calculus felt kind of pointless."

Looking up at the water falling softer upon them through the trees, he tilted his head trying to keep the boy moving.

Draco had paused when Kira started plucking at the needles. A rather odd thing to do for someone who'd insisted they get out of the rain. There was a strange sort of curiosity under his irritation. The move looked rather deliberate, or at least more deliberate than idly picking at something for lack of something to do. Why would this strange person--he was hesitant to call Kira a kid, but nor was he what Draco would think of as a man--have such an interest in pine needles now of all times?

Pushing on, he let out a derisive snort, as if his moving had nothing to do with Kira's urging. Anything to prove he wasn't the one at a disadvantage here. But it was difficult to maintain such superiority when one looked like someone had tried to drown a white rat in a mud puddle.

"What the bloody hell is a calculus?!" For as detailed as a wizarding education was on ways of magic and history, there were some things it lacked. Like advanced mathematics.

"Boring, hard to bullshit assignments for." Numbers have their own power and meanings, but in the world of equations and grading, they became rigid things with black and white answers.

Before he'd all but stopped speaking to him, Kira's father had tried to sit down and help him grasp it. Maybe it really was all his fault--Daichi had tried to bridge the gap, had tried to explain something important to him, had told him that if he jumped the chasm of his own unlinking from the world, he would catch him on the other side. Kira had thrown that in his face, unable to care about what his father cared about, and then left school entirely.

He hadn't needed it, but maybe his father had needed him to. Not to love him, but to relate to him. To have anything left to say. "It's stupid," he says anyway, bitterly entrenched in his decision: "It's some stupid kind of math, you won't need it here

"Assuming you actually learned some magic, has it--worked? Here, I mean."

The answer is not one that sits quite so well with Draco. It makes him wonder if he's landed with someone too much like the likes of Ron Weasley. Someone who never too school seriously and thought he could skate through it while making everything up. But Draco's classes, the ones he valued anyway, were the very sort that had black and white answers. Potions had incredibly precise measurements and components. Missing so much as a single clockwise stir could have catastrophic results.

Then again, perhaps he listened a bit too much to his father. Followed a bit too much of his father's aspirations rather than his own. But how did one learn how to listen to their own ambitions when tradition and family had been ground into him since he could remember? His father loved him, it was something he'd never doubted. But it wasn't a warm sort of emotion. More like a cold and distant protector there only to ensure he stayed on the correct path. A sharp tap of a cane to the shoulder was all he needed to remind him he was straying too far.

The question about magic snapped him back to the moment, and he looked over his shoulder at Kira. It was a dangerous question, because he still didn't know for sure whether the other was a wizard or not. He could be, but he might not be. And now it was both his father and the man called Graves in his head, warning him to stay his tongue on the matter.

"I could ask you the same, couldn't I? About any of your...abilities." He didn't even know if Kira had any, but he'd run into far too many people who had strange things they could do that were types of magic, but could be done without a wand, without incantations, but they could not access other areas of magic.

Kira stops in the shelter of another thickly branched pine, drops guided by enough needles to slither down the trunk or run off the tips at the very edge. There were dead and dry needles under their feet, on a slight bump of earth that sloped down into the path. Ren's house would be nearby, somewhere across from it, which meant some length of path to go before the fountain, and a need to cross through the open to get near the inn.

He shouldn't let urgency guide them to wandering lost through houses and trees, but the boy had to be hungry, and if he's been out in this chill since he arrived, the sooner he dries out by the fire, the better. Kira lifts a hand to catch himself on a low hanging branch, and leans out along the slope, testing the strength of the rain with his other hand. "They're weaker," he admits. "Some of them just don't work entirely, or so little that I can't tell if they're working. Everyone else I've asked says something similar, it's alright if you can't do much." Perhaps at full strength, he could sense more about the cause of the boy's hesitance to speak on it, but all he can do is plunge ahead--both with the subject, and out into the spattering rain, doing his best to step light through the washed path.

"We have to cross sometime," he calls back through the hiss of rain, not looking back to make sure the boy follows.

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002. I sat alone, in bed till the morning - OTA (Part 1)

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