for the stars { a n n e }

Anne flashed him her rare playful smile. "No, that's cheating. I'll charm them for you if it gets that bad." She'd watched her parents do it for her brothers when they were younger and she was quite confident she could do it too, but she always made them try first before she let Papa help them. "Failing is part of it," she declared. "You can't really learn to skate if you never feel the ice against your body." 

Rémi exuded an air of pleasure and she couldn't help letting it lift some of her skepticism. They weren't the most outdoorsy of people, not like Jaspar, but Anne had seen him in the ocean that bordered the palace on a few occasions, so she wasn't surprised. Anne herself liked still water, like lakes and ponds (and ice), but it was mostly an aesthetic appreciation. When Rémi asked her if she was going to join him, she raised an eyebrow, then drew all five feet of herself up in protest. "I beg your pardon! I can't exactly, anyways." He probably couldn't see her blush, but it wasn't as if girls had the same freedom that he was now exhibiting. Anne was a proper young lady.

Then again...the young witch looked down at her attire. Although she was wearing a loose sweater, the Dutch girl had a black camisole underneath that, and leggings underneath her boots. Under the curtain of night, it didn't seem to matter so much anymore. She reached down and unzipped her boots, stepping out of them, bare feet cold on the cobblestone, and pulled her scarf off, recoiling it in a spiral and resting it on them before pulling off her sweater as well and folding it neatly on top. "'What the hell,' indeed" she quoted him and used her arms to push herself over the rim of the fountain, pulling off her elastic and shaking her wavy hair loose.

The water was cool but quickly better than staying outside losing heat from her skin as the droplets evaporated. Anne thought about specific heat for a moment as she immersed herself in the water, her hair floating up around her upturned face like coral. "I have some regrets," she remarked with a laugh.

If only some of their less straight-laced peers could see them now.

No magic? Rémi's skepticism went up a little. Falling was part of it? That didn't sound appealing at all, honestly. He wasn't one to honour traditions that didn't make any sense - this was an area where he and Anne did have some differences. Rémi was all for destroying hierarchies and believed that no tradition or social convention was inherently valuable. He preferred to examine each one individually for it's pragmatism and individual worth. The tradition of falling while learning to ice skate made no sense to him.

Rémi watched her as she delivered her rebuttal. He shrugged. Girls cared too much about things like that, he thought. Why couldn't she just come in in what she was wearing? She didn't have to strip naked. Momentarily, Rémi examined a little conflict in his beliefs as he wondered what the problem of swimming naked in the fountain would be anyway. the idea made him incredibly uncomfortable, but that was just a societal construct, right? Why did people have to wear clothes in front of each other? Why couldn't women take their tops off in public? He believed in equality and freedom from useless societal binds, didn't he? Rémi looked at Anne again but had to look away as she stripped, even though he knew she wasn't about to take her top off. He didn't think she'd be very comfortable with him imagining her topless. Even if it was for science.

To get his head somewhere else, Rémi ducked under water again. He was puzzled at his own thoughts, but fought back against the confused feeling. Just think about something else he thought to himself before reemerging. He looked at her again, doing his best not to notice certain things like the way the thin material of her singlet thing clung to her wet body. "It's good right?" He asked, glad that his complexion didn't really allow for him to blush. After a moment, he felt his thoughts settle as he got more reflective. "Thanks for coming over," he said, uncharacteristically sentimental, "this has been super fun." Rémi floated in the water happily. "I can't wait to go back to Beauxbatons, honestly."

Anne rolled her eyes at the look Rémi was giving her. Going in water fully clothed was uncomfortable, and stripping completely was not an option for obvious reasons. It wasn't as if it was hard to understand. She sighed, feeling peaceful, and tilted her head in his direction, looking at the way her flaxen curls bobbed up in the water like waves. "It's pretty nice, even if it is a little...out of the ordinary." She made an exaggerated motion of looking around to illustrate her point. A gentle orange glow suffused the area around the streetlamps.

Turning her attention back to her friend, Anne pushed herself up so the water came up to the middle of her torso, meeting his eyes underneath that flicker. In this lighting, the dark brown that you could see in the sunlight faded to black. "As if I would leave you alone with them all summer," she said matter-of-factly. "And it's been nice to get away from home and do things I, well, wouldn't normally do." A smile tugged the corner of her lips upward, little puffs of laughter escaping. Anne thought back on their day, from the dark magic box and the telescope to the glass and slate and this. Anne loved how their friendship made room for both of their interests, but left enough space between them to forge their own way. "Thanks for taking me here. I know it's more my thing than yours." It was like he was sharing a piece of him, too.

"Wow, that's a new one from you," Anne said, raising her eyebrows. "Good thing we'll be there in a few weeks, then. What do you want to do this year?"

Rémi floated happily on his back, dark eyes reflecting starlight as he watched the obsidian sky twinkle at him. When she started talking again, though, he shifted gracefully in the water, moving like he was born swimming rather than walking. Rémi wasn't particularly graceful generally speaking. He wasn't clumsy, but no one would describe him as graceful. In the water though, it was a whole other story. He met her eyes.

As if I would leave you alone with them all summer.

Rémi liked the way she said that. All matter-off-fact, like it was the most sensible thing in the world. How much he liked it took him by surprise. How particular, his enjoyment of that one sentence. How peculiar. He shrugged when she thanked him; perhaps it was more her thing than his, but there was a lot about this that was entirely his thing too. "I want to take you to the river near my house sometime," he said. "Not tomorrow though, it should be at night." There was something about this atmosphere that he enjoyed that he knew wouldn't be present in the light of day. It was all in his head, of course - the sense of isolation like they were the only two people that existed. It was imagined. But he still felt like that, and a part of him wanted to maintain this energy as best he could.

Rémi almost laughed, but just sort of half-smiled instead.  It was true that it was unusual of him to be looking forward to school. Previous summers had just been so full of exciting adventures. From trips to Korea to long days spent taking things apart with his dad, Rémi usually dreaded the close of the summer break. This year, however, it was going to be a relief to be back there. A part of him almost enjoyed his endless tirade against the school administration and the whole system. "Enjoy" probably wasn't the right word though. He didn't enjoy it, but it was at least familiar.

"I want to infiltrate Kravetz' little club and bring it down from the inside," Rémi said mock-seriously, before actually laughing at himself. The night atmosphere had him much more relaxed and less self-aware than usual. "I don't know. Maybe break some rules. Learn some things we're not allowed to." There were all kinds of restricted books and papers that they could mess around with. "How about you? any big plans?" after a moment's hesitation, he added, "Want to climb the social ladder this year? Get a boyfriend?" He was teasing her, of course. Anne Hofstede was no Gabrielle Delacour, he thought, the tone of his thoughts complimenting.

"We could go right now. We are already wet," Anne pointed out, gesturing to her drenched camisole. She didn't know what Rémi had planned for the rest of the night--were they going to get any sleep or not?--but it felt like they had the run of the entire town and environs, as deserted as they were. Anne glanced up towards the stars, her eyes adjusting for a moment. The orange glow diffusing from the lanterns shed some light poisoning into the sky, but it wasn't bad. The Milky Way stretched across the celestial dome in dull glimmer. "You should propose a non-polluting form of streetlamps to the town," she remarked. "The Muggles are having trouble with it, but I think it would be an easy change with magic. Either conjuring caps so the photons don't radiate skyward or inventing a long-lasting charm to conjure directional light."

Anne shook her head, a knowing and familiar smile on her face. "Please don't. If you do that I'll have to join with you, and that means spending time with him," she declared with a mock-shudder. "Classic Rémi, I suppose. No surprises there. You know, I never thought about it before, but the monopoly on learning is rather senseless. I mean, things in the restricted section of the library can be obtained by going to a bookstore after all."

What did she want to do? Anne frowned at his teasing suggestion, splashing water lightly in his direction and searching for a suitable retort. "Don't make light, don't you know how much groundwork I've laid during the last three years for my eventual takeover of the social scene?" Anne wasn't interested in the traditional metrics of social status. She understood them, at least at face value, because Anne made a point of breaking down and understanding how things around her worked. She thought her assessment of Kravets' group to Jaspar last term had been apt. She might even be able to adopt the proper strategies to succeed in them, but she was more interested in observing from the outside. "I want to study the intersection of magical theory and atomic theory. And I want to build something. I haven't decided what yet." A small structure, probably. Not practical at that scale, but beautiful, and with the potential for scaling up.

Rémi pushed back in the water, tilting his head back a little to feel the liquid push through the strands of his hair. Anne gestured to her drenched top and the boy's gaze flicked down, then away. "Yeah, I guess," he answered, his dark eyes turning up to the sky as he floated lazily on his back. "It's a small hike." Rémi wasn't an idiot, he understood the strange feeling he was feeling even if it was unfamiliar. It wasn't something he'd ever associated with Anne before; it had a something to do with the way the thin material of her camisole clung to her body and her chest. It also probably had a lot to do with the fact that they were alone, in the middle of the night, breaking rules together. Rémi felt less self aware and introspective than usual. Or at least he had, until this point.

Trying not to let any of this internal dialogue affect the way he behaved, he tuned back into what she was saying. He jumped as she splashed him unexpectedly. "Oh yeah, loads of groundwork," he agreed, genuinely smiling at the thought as he shifted upright again, wiping one of his eyes with the back of his hand. "Maybe I'll ask Gabrielle Delacour on a date," he added blankly, touching his forefinger to his chin thoughtfully, as if he was actually considering it. His disdain for that girl and her group of babbling butterflies was no secret.

The boy flicked his dark eyes her way again as she mentioned atomic theory. One of the most frustrating things about the magical education system (one of a very long list, according to Rémi) was the fact that it was so blatantly ignorant of muggle science. Not even "muggle science", Rémi corrected internally, just science. Electricity worked, didn't it? So why weren't they taught about the way that magic could interact with electrons? Why didn't they make magical fuel sources and use something similar to electricity to power things? Rémi didn't know much about computers but from what he'd read, they seemed extremely advanced. It was a travesty that the magical world ignored such advancements. "Like a bomb?" he asked jokingly, cracking a crooked smirk for her.

"Is that a no, then?" she asked languidly, content to stare up at the sky for the moment but curious to see what it meant to him. Anne loved seeing places. It was true that a lot of that had to do with her architectural interests, but Anne thought that seeing where a person was from told you something ineffable about them. Like Rémi's attic room, today: a place he'd mentioned innumerable times over the past three years, but only tangible the moment she'd stepped into it. It was as if her conception of the Korean boy, all her files and structures, had become housed in that room in her mind, as if it had become caught and bound up permanently with her understanding of her friend. It was easier to understand history if you stood in it.

A little smirk flitted across the Dutch girl's face as he jumped at the unexpected water. Anne thought she was very predictable, and she preferred it that way, but she thought it was a little nice to surprise him. Rémi, on the other hand, was so unpredictable that she would be more baffled if he suddenly followed social norms. Such as asking Gabrielle Delacour on a date, the way half the boys in school were falling over themselves to do. Anne wrinkled her nose at the idea, feeling vaguely offended by the thought, though she was well aware he wasn't serious. The company Gabrielle kept couldn't be more different from the company Anne kept. If Jaspar or Rémi suddenly professed serious interest in her, it would feel like a slight against the kind of friendship she had with them. Anne felt sure, from the times she'd observed the quarter-veela from a distance, there was more to Gabrielle herself than the types she enjoyed surrounding herself with, but the Ombrelune girl didn't ever intend to get close enough to find out what. Gabrielle unnerved her, the way it felt like she was supposed to like her even when she objectively couldn't elevate her to anything beyond neutral feelings. "Please don't."

"Rémi!" Anne laughed, shaking her head a little as she met his eyes, although the idea--not the fact that it came from him, of course--shocked her a little upon full consideration. Anne's spirit was creative and conservative, not destructive. "I bet magic could amplify an atom bomb," she said, serious for a moment. "Maybe that's the real reason why they don't teach us nuclear physics at school." From her limited understanding, the need for bureaucracy and the impossibility of a lone actor contributed to the lack of further employment of nuclear arms thus far in the Muggle world. Wizarding Ministries were notoriously ineffective, though, and a powerful wizard could do great damage, the way one had in Britain. "But no, those things weren't connected. A kinetic sculpture, maybe. Maybe I'll try to capture electricity with magic and motion."

Rémi gave a shrug. He did want to take her there, but without anyone of age around there was a higher chance of the pair being caught for using magic. He hadn't exactly packed a torch in his backpack tonight. Then again... He had packed a telescope, and while the city architecture was interesting - at least to his friend - the light pollution made it harder to see the stars here. "I mean..." He trailed off thoughtfully. It was a bit of a walk. The Ombrelune mentally went through the various ways magic might help him if they did end up going there. "Maybe."

The teenager derived a certain level of pleasure from seeing Anne wrinkle her nose at the idea of him and Gabrielle together. He was never subtle about things he did or didn't dislike; when he wanted to say something, he didn't keep his mouth shut. His satisfaction made its way into his expression. She wouldn't say yes anyway, he thought distantly. "Theoretically, you wouldn't think it would be too hard to split atoms with magic, right?" Rémi drifted to the side of the fountain and pushed himself up and out so that he was sitting on the edge, with only his legs swishing slowly in the water. His gleeful expression shifted to something much more thoughtful as he imagined it. There were spells for cutting and slicing; spells for making things fall apart; growing; shrinking.

There were spells for summoning... "What would happen if I just tried to summon some electrons... or neutrons?" he asked thoughtfully, her last comment about the sculpture forgotten as his curious mind delved into the possibility. "I mean, it's fission that we're talking about, right? Nuclear fission?" Sometimes he got the terms mixed up. Rémi got to his feet at the edge of the fountain and hopped down to the dry ground on the other side gracefully, still obviously caught up with the idea. "I wonder how we could force magic to interact with something high in thermodynamic free energy," he mused. It was likely that nothing would happen with the summoning, thing he thought. The more he read, the more Rémi understood the magical world to have all kinds of strange arbitrary rules; Gamp's law and it's exemptions were perfect examples of that. The teenager walked in a slow circle around the fountain as he thought. He wondered how those particular rules would apply to subatomic particles.

"Have you heard about solar power?" he asked suddenly, "Do you know how that works?" Rémi had only done rudimentary research into the idea of "renewable" energy.

Anne nodded silently, considering that moving would require them to step out, the evaporating water leaving a night chill behind. Although she wanted to see it, Anne was never very perturbed by not receiving immediate gratification. She didn't try to exert the force of herself on the world. Her friendship with Rémi worked because they walked freely together.

Rémi pushed himself onto the lip of the fountain, and she sighed slightly, heaving herself out to match him but shivering a little. She didn't want to dry herself off; it was a bit of a strange charm, and might raise some flags in a way Lumos probably rarely did. "I think it depends," she said thoughtfully. "Diffindo might work by selecting atoms to separate in a line, in which case applying it to atoms might be difficult. There's also the matter of intent, right? Magic gets a boost through good visualization, like with Apparition. The scale of empty atomic space is nearly incomprehensible to our minds, I think." Anne loved the concept of fundamental particles, though. Did quarks have subparticles, after all? Maybe magic was the missing piece to the understanding of elementary particles.

"Maybe it would work, actually," she offered. "Especially with electrons, especially from a metal. But it's not scientifically useful unless it's verifiable, and I don't think proving it would be simple." Head full of atoms, she forgot the cold, her geometric mind picturing spinning structures. "But maybe if you had a structure already...take gold and summon...32 protons and electrons and...I forget how many neutrons the stable isotope has...per atom...gold turning into silver would have verifiable material property differences. Maybe not silver, I think it might have multiple isotopes." Atomic numbers were easy to remember, but when moving into isotopes it was too detailed even for her.

She didn't follow Rémi out of the fountain; Anne wasn't a pacer. "I think you would just get random bombardment of subatomic particles if you summoned, instead of something splitting into multiple nuclei, too. I think your real problem would be generating enough magical force to split an atom. Think about it, some of us don't have the raw strength to produce a Patronus."

Tilting her head in his direction as he leapt into a different conversation direction, she shrugged a little, leaning over the side to grab her sweater and tugging it close around her body instead of pulling it on. "Sure, I mean, it's been around since the late 19th century. Light is energy, electrons are excited in a semiconductor, they move in one direction due to the construction of the solar cell and generate an electric current. What about it?"

"Right," he said, his thought patterns echoing her own. Distantly, his mind threw pictures of the periodic table. Ag, Au. He remembered the symbols as she said the words. Still shirtless, Rémi scratched his chest absentmindedly. It was a little cool out, but he was too intellectually stimulated to worry about something so irrelevant as his own bodily comfort right now. "Maybe in fifty years we'll be able to see them," he said distantly, a glimmer of hope as he imagined a microscope under which he could observe subatomic particles. Wizards were so frustrating, he thought. If they'd wanted to, they could have colonised the moon by now, he was sure. A tangental thought shot out to the left as he wondered how a different vantage point might affect such things as the study of divination.

"Okay, that's true," Rémi conceded, a little irritated at the way her logic had stopped the driving motion of his thoughts. "Though I don't know if it's entirely a problem with strength as it is a problem with finesse," he added as a side thought. He'd never cast a corporeal patronus, but Rémi had always attributed that to lack of practise - actual, mental practise - and, frankly, his attitude. Magic could be horribly, pretentiously precocious sometimes. Any spell based on something as abstract as "a happy memory" made him want to roll his eyes into another dimension. The teenager used to think a class like potions, for example, would be more precise in nature but it was just as bad. Rémi scowled a little remembering many potions that had measurements like "a pinch" or "a handful" rather than going by weight or discrete numbers. Spells where one was required to think of something happy for the spell to work frustrated him, but he did believe it was something that you could work on and learn.

"I don't know," he said, his usually expressionless lips quirking into a bit of a half-smile as she spoke. A quarter smile, maybe. "I just think it's cool." She was prettier, he thought, when she talked about science. It was a useless and vapid sort of observation, and more about him, really than her. He didn't like the way that thoughts like that objectified her for the purpose of making a new mental observation about himself but there was no point berating himself over thoughts he had no control over, so he didn't. He'd just appreciate her and leave it at that. The teenager stopped pacing and slung his backpack over one shoulder, waiting for her to follow him.

Anne turned in his direction as he responded, as if from a distance. They talked like this all the time, taking their turns looking inward instead of outward, but she always liked looking at him when it was his turn. Seeing Rémi concentrate was nice, especially when he was concentrating on something she challenged him to think about. "It'll be faster if you decide you want to make it happen," she pointed out. Maybe there was a degree of blindness, but Anne had utmost confidence in Rémi's ability to make whatever tangible achievements he wanted to. Anne thought about Rosalind Franklin, dead at 38 of ovarian cancer, or Ada Lovelace, dead at 36 of uterine cancer, or Heinrich Hertz, dead at 36 of an infection, or Blaise Pascal, dead at 39 from Merlin knew what. Well, wizards lived much longer than Muggles: long enough to make real advances, if they had the vision.

She shrugged, not having enough experience with the Patronus charm to comment. "If I was sure about all the rules I guess I'd be able to cast everything already," she laughed softly. "I know everyone is always eager to graduate," she said thoughtfully, "but I wonder whether we'll miss the resources when we leave." They hadn't even passed the halfway point yet, but they spent so long in the early years going over such basic things that it didn't feel like they really had seven years to take advantage of everything Beauxbatons had to offer.

"It is cool," she smiled. It was more cool, she thought, because sometimes it seemed like they were the only ones who knew about it. She only had these conversations with Rémi and Jaspar; sometimes it seemed like no one else was interested in learning these underlying principles about the world. As though because wizards could see all the things that Muggles couldn't, they didn't need to dig any deeper. Anne thought it was the opposite. They were the ones who had all the cards on the table; it was their responsibility to be the ones to connect all the concepts. The theory of everything would have to come from a wizard. "But they need to work on battery technology before it can be anything. That's kind of what I was thinking about when I mentioned kinetic sculptures. If magic could bridge the gap to scalable energy storage..." Well, the Muggles wouldn't be able to use it, which would be sorry in several ways--a handful of wizards couldn't achieve as much as thousands of Muggles, on the basis of pure numbers--but it would still be a big step.

Rémi wanted to move on, so Anne hopped down from the fountain, practically using her scarf to dry off her feet before stepping into her boots. "Do you think finding a theory of everything even matters?"

Rémi looked over at her, blinking for a moment as he assessed her words, making sure he understood them. She hadn't spoken that sentence like most people did when they gave compliments, but Anne wasn't most people and her manner of speaking did not ever suggest that she was. He nodded a little, agreeing with the abstract thought process behind her words rather than specifically her faith in him. Though quietly, he appreciated that part too.

"It's a trap," Rémi commented, unimpressed. Like the everyone she'd mentioned, Rémi was more than eager to be done with school. The whole system was tedious, and too many of the people there were far too preoccupied with the tiny high school world they were invested in. It was like a weird little terrarium or something; fed by the sunlight, existing in its own bubble. He understood what she meant when she spoke of resources, but the young wizard was convinced that they - specifically him and her, in this context - did not need to rely on Beauxbatons to extend their knowledge and learning. He didn't doubt that most of their peers would cease active learning as soon as their seven years were up, but he and Anne would not. Perhaps he was being a little too superior here? Thinking too little of his schoolmates? A couple of Papillonlisse boys' faces appeared in the back of his mind and he decided that it wasn't unwarranted.

Speaking of being fed by the sunlight... Rémi nodded when she mentioned batteries, his thoughts then immediately flicking to the function of magic in such research. He was only fourteen, but he could do it, he thought. He could contribute to something like this - especially in an area that wizarding society cared so little about. It dawned on him once more that there weren't that many wizards like him and his friend, so eager to combine muggle and magical scientific theories. The teenager felt a lick of something power hungry and he filed the feeling away to dissect later. He couldn't help but feel a little smug as her words seemed to echo his thoughts. He couldn't help but feel a little superior to the rest of their class when he and Anne had conversations like this.

"I suppose that's one of those things, isn't it?" he mused, watching her dry her feet off, feeling a little impatient. "If we could do it, it would matter, right? Like, how useful would it be to be able to rely on a comprehensive, single framework that connected everything?" Rémi felt a tingle of that power hungry feeling again, though his words were characteristically lacking much variation in intonation. "But I think there are probably better places to dedicate our time." Solar power, for example, he thought distantly.

Conceptually, "physics" - however much you broke it into digestible pieces - was extremely convoluted and complicated. That was part of the appeal, he thought. Being able to comprehend complex ideas and the simultaneous satisfaction and dissatisfaction as one understood something new, thus realising there was so much more to understand, were all elements that were appealing by nature. To him at least. But the idea of being able to reduce so many complex ideas against a simple framework, understand seemingly un-understandable concepts, access a singular method of prediction that was more or less universal... it appealed too.

Mathematics held a sort of simplicity and - importantly - a reproducibility that many areas of magic did not. The idea of somehow merging the two was irresistible; perhaps that was why arithmancy appealed so much, despite its strong ties to divination. He wondered what a theory of everything might look like with magic as a factor.

Rémi started walking as Anne did, adjusting his backpack against his bare back. "Here," he said, holding his hand out for her now-wet scarf, intending to pop it into his bag.

Anne just smiled in amusement at his flippant response. It wasn't that she didn't believe him; it would be remiss of anyone to not take his words seriously. The filter he lacked meant that he meant what he said, to one degree or the next. Despite that, his statements were also not to be read into for hidden meaning; where someone else might read a degree of personal dismissiveness, a judgement of the person who would make the suggestion she did, there was no such thing lurking behind his comment. "A poorly designed one, then," she teased, "which does a poor job of keeping anyone longer than they'd like. You could drop out today, you know." She briefly imagined the prospect of three more years of Beauxbatons without Rémi around, which loomed unappealingly before dissipating in a haze. It was a sufficiently practical trap to keep him in it for now, at least.

Arranging her slightly damp scarf around her neck, Anne thought about how one distinguished the best places to dedicate one's time. "How do you feel about the idea that to be truly great at something it has to be your main focus?" People were usually known for their one great achievement, or a body of related work, the rest of their lives receding into the background as minor biographical details to paint some sort of supporting picture, to satisfy the human tendency to want a narrative. Too many things sparked their interest; the idea of giving them up in pursuit of a sort of purity seemed like something of a betrayal, almost. "I mean, post-Renaissance." After the world had been proven to be more complex than their predecessors had thought it.

"Oh," she started in response to is hand, considering for a moment and then deciding that it was probably a good idea to let it dry off of her body. She smiled gratefully as she set its folds in his hand, then gave him a sideways glance. "Is it that warm?" she teased. Both of them liked the winter, but that didn't mean she didn't dress appropriately for it.

The quiet that surrounded them might seem stifling without breaking it, but there was a comfort in being able to say nothing and not feel put upon, as though she was breaking some social pact to avoid awkwardness. Anne liked how they would go back and forth between intensive discussion and moments like this, footfalls some kind of aural communion. She felt it all the more acutely that this was only a brief interlude in their summers, after which the norm would return to isolation for him and fields and cows for her. She sighed heavily. Some sort of udder infection in the cows had made her father especially tense during the past week.

"Yeah, maybe I will," he joked, straight-faced. Dropping out held an appeal, it was true. But she was right - or, at least the next logical step to her words was right - he wasn't going to drop out anytime soon. Despite all of the things he hated about the school; it's students; the teachers; the entire structure of their education system; they both knew that he couldn't leave. Definitely not while he was still underage, at least. A part of him felt a bit sheepish at the way she drew attention to his hypocrisy, but he liked that she wasn't afraid to do so. She was honest in a different way to the way he was honest. It was useful; it was good.

"You know i'm not into absolutes like that," Rémi mused with a bit of a shrug, "but I think it's probably mostly true?" He turned the idea over in his head, his thoughts tangenting inevitably to the feeling that he should probably start specialising soon if he wanted to join the ranks of those that were truly great at something. His family were well off. Richer than Anne's. He had a great starting point to achieve lofty academic goals, if academia was something that he wanted to invest in. "Mastery's only relative anyway," he added.

A moment ago, it had been that warm, but now - especially as she pointed it out - the night chill had goosebumps erupt up and down his arms. Rémi scratched his chest, more aware of his body than he usually was. He swung his backpack to one side to loop her scarf through a strap, then drew his shirt out and awkwardly pulled it on before readjusting his bag. After the fact, he noted that he could have asked for her assistance.

The pair walked in relative silence for a while. Rémi's pace was a little slower than it had been on the way into the city, and he intentionally took them a longer path back simply because he was reluctant to return home so soon. The teenager felt a weird compulsion to bring up things that they didn't usually talk about, like fears and flaws and deeper feelings. Even bizzarre topics like romantic interests or sex. Insecurities about his own life or the home he was returning to. Was that a symptom of being in a space like this together? The simulated intimacy? The isolation, the quiet, the dark? Some kind of sleepover syndrome. He didn't like it.

"Nearly there," he said reluctantly.

Anne's look was skeptical. "Not like you to rely on technicalities," she declared, though there was no bite to her voice. He knew what she meant, relative or not - the simple allure of making salient contributions to something worth one's time. She wasn't sure if that was truly an innate drive for her. In a different world, she thought she might be more content to simply learn, if she had that luxury. But there was a certain insight and clarity developed her conversations with Rémi and Jaspar that made the idea of never driving their interests to synthesis and creation seem some sort of waste. If she thought about it more deeply, she wasn't necessarily committed to that idea, either, of course. Anne had never been the sort of selfless that led to subsuming oneself for a cause. For family, perhaps, but she suspected that any sort of notoriety would be more damaging to them than beneficial.

The path back was quiet and wooded, the gentle chirp of the crickets she'd noted before enveloping them in the kind of haze that suspended them some distance away from most of the world. Anne was rarely outside at night now; she'd preferred to stay inside when possible as a girl, especially after the sun went down, and it was no different at Beauxbatons. But there was something timeless about the night--her unfamiliarity with the rising and setting of stars, or perhaps it was simply being away from any clocks. It helped that it was Rémi's world, she thought. Less enchanted with the outdoors on its own merits, it became a tangible, immersive lens to a slightly different facet of her friend when they were just walking through it, his assured steps leading hers.

Anne's mouth opened in a small yawn as he mentioned their nearness to the house. The lack of enthusiasm in his voice slowed her steps a little, the gravity of the timelessness she had just felt pulling her backwards for a moment. "Hey," she said suddenly. She knew she hadn't been terribly sentimental earlier when he had been, but Anne did care somewhat to express these things occasionally. Most of the time it was completely straightforward between her and Rémi. Their friendship lived in the present and in the next day or so, when they would inevitably see each other in class or around the common room. It wasn't one that required a lot of stop-and-reflect. "I know I said thanks for bringing me out earlier, but mostly, thanks for sharing all this with me." She waved a hand to generally indicate their environs. It was like what she had thought earlier in the afternoon, when she'd first arrived, about what it meant to be home, and what that meant about claims and belonging.

She tilted her head back to stare upwards at the faint glimmer of stars, something about her earlier question that she hadn't fully expressed then niggling at the back of her mind. "About that thing about focusing on something, though. Do you ever worry that things - not little ones, I mean overall - just aren't going to go the way you hope they will?" Rémi wasn't like her, in many ways - more adaptable, more flexible, to her looking for patterns and fitting things to schemata. Maybe that made him more resilient. Maybe he had to be, with what he'd already lived through.