for the stars { a n n e }

Rémi pulled his shirt on over his head, then picked his backpack up from the ground and started walking again. “Yeah, basically,” he agreed distantly. He adjusted the straps, then walked in silence for a bit, just appreciating the ambient sounds of distant critters and leaves rustling in the wind when a breeze blew.

As his house came into view again, the teenager couldn’t help a sigh slipping out. When he was with her, out of the house, it felt like they were in their own little world. They could speculate on things like his family and school, from a safe, analytical sort of distance. He could see his attic window now, the room that was more or less his self-imposed house prison.

His walk slowed a little, his feet apparently reluctant to return home. It was pretty late, he thought, they’d probably actually have to go to bed soon, although he’d rather stay up all night with her. The thought of getting told off by his stepmother if they ended up falling asleep in the same room or whatever made him sigh again.

Sometimes, when Rémi was feeling extremely petty, he wished his Korean name was a bit harder for French people to pronounce. He didn’t like the fact that Emma or the step-monster were learning Korean (it was the reason he’d switched to speaking Japanese exclusively when he had to talk to his father) and he hated when they used it. He got some kind of condescending pleasure from the way his step-mother butchered his dad’s name, and he wished that she butchered his too, so he could correct her without getting reprimanded by his dad.

“My Korean name is Tae Min,” he said quietly, glancing at Anne expressionlessly. “I haven’t told you that, have I?” his dad always swapped to using his other name when he had friends over. Rémi hadn’t ever liked the idea of sharing the name with people from school; it felt like something that was just his, and his dad’s. He felt like the others would abuse it somehow. He liked having his own things. But he thought he knew Anne pretty well, and he knew that she wasn’t like most of Beauxbatons. There was a reason they were friends, after all.

“Anyway, uh.” Rémi went back to walking, busying himself with digging around in his backpack for the ladder that they’d climbed down on.

Anne slipped her feet back into her boots, draping her dry sweater around her slowly drying tanktop, wisps of her hair starting to frizz up in a halo around her face. Anne tried to manage her hair so it wouldn't get so wild most of the time, but she didn't mind if Rémi saw her like this. That was a theme in general - Anne didn't mind if Rémi saw her, all her carefully organized complexities, the pieces she was still moving and filling in. She liked how she presented to the world, and thought it was fairly authentic, but she was only fourteen, and that made her a work in progress. Rémi could see the process of it all, not just the finished product.

They walked in a comfortable silence, the way they had come in, letting the world take up plenty of its own space. This outdoors was not an aggressive one; crickets and other night insects played a backdrop to the sound of their steps on the dirt. Rémi was quite a bit taller than her, but she wasn't one to let him walk ahead of her or compensate with her steps, matching him stride for stride and rhythm for rhythm. The best thing about her and Rémi's friendship was their consonant equality.

She glanced at him, her smile turning sympathetic as he sighed. Truth be told, Anne thought she usually went to bed earlier than he did, but she had the ability of youth to push away sleepiness for the sake of these delicate moments. Her eyebrows drew down slightly, hearing a pain in his offering. Anne wasn't the type of person who tried to fix other people's problems. Usually they could either fix them on their own, or they just weren't the type of thing that could be fixed. This was the second one, and all you could do was search for analgesics. Apparently he was finding one in this offering.

"Tae Min," she acknowledged quietly, her tongue curling carefully around the unfamiliar syllables as she tried to do it right. "Not really. I heard...someone else use it earlier." She remembered how Emma's mother had said it, and the tone of Rémi's reply. "Thank you for sharing it with me. I know it carries weight for you, Rémi. I won't profane it all the time," she chuckled softly. Anne searched for something she could share, but anything that she would say would make what he'd said seem like she weighed it less by analogy to all her more pedestrian things. "Thanks for sharing all of this with me, actually." She shrugged. Not that she didn't think that she saw Rémi - more than any of their peers did, certainly - but people were complex and this was another part of him.

She leaned against the wall as he searched for the ladder. "We don't have to go back up yet. Not like they know we're here," she said, tilting her head toward the upstairs. "Then again, the faster time passes the sooner we'll be back at school." Implicitly, away from them and even away from Emma. Thank Merlin for Houses.

“Oh, right” he said, his expression still characteristically blank. He knew she’d catch the sliver of bitterness in his flat voice, though. It hadn’t been hers to give away, he thought, feeling instantly critical of the poetic tone of his internal phrasing. He couldn’t help but give Anne a smile - just a half one - at her next words though. Sometimes she surprised him with how well she understood him, though he knew he probably shouldn’t be surprised considering how well he felt he understood her though.

“True,” he replied, a little amused. It was some great injustice that he felt like there was more space in Beauxbatons palace, where he had to share a room with, like, six other teenagers and didn’t get his own bathroom, than here at home, where he lived in a three storey house and his next neighbours took a full ten minutes to walk to.

Still, after an extra moment spent with his eyes turned skyward as he observed the stars, Rémi set up the magical rope ladder, recalling the way she’d been interested in it when they left. He ascended, then waited for her at the top.

“Probably should go to bed,” he said as she climbed through the window. Rémi moved to his set of drawers and tugged his tshirt off again, tossing it in the vague direction of his laundry basket. He went through the clothes in there, looking for PJs. “You don’t need anything right?” he asked quietly, glancing over at her.

Anne made a flat smile. That was the other thing about the way her mind worked, always searching to observe. Whether it was people, or the universe, it seemed that most things were inviting themselves to be seen, and that was half the battle. Not that Anne approved of anthropomorphizing subatomic particles, but she could separate a scientific self from a philosophical self.

She climbed the ladder up to the attic after him, and nodded at his suggestion. This time, with them having been under the stars this entire time, she could see despite the darkness. She tried not to stare at him when he tossed his shirt off again. For all that Anne and Rémi spent so much time together, the dorm separation kept them developing from this particular sort of physical casualness around each other. Treading the line in between making it weird by averting her gaze immediately and making it weird by not averting it early enough, she let her gaze drift toward the skylight again, although she had to look back down at his question.

"No, I'm good I think," she said, and then smiled. Maybe the casualness was the point. Anne took off her shoes and scooped them up in her arms so she would be quiet on the stairs. "I'll see you in the morning? Should I just go downstairs when I wake up or wait for you?"

Nodding at his answer, Anne slipped out of his room with a wave and crept down the stairs, testing each one for creaks before putting a foot down. Quickly changing into her own nightgown, Anne pulled a stray grass out of her hair. Both grimacing at the implications for her cleanliness and smiling a little at the tangible evidence of the past several hours, she tucked it in between the pages of her book and and lay back for a deep sleep.

[fin]

“Uh, Maybe just come up here,” he said. Rémi didn’t know who’d wake first; he wasn’t someone who slept in a lot, though he’d been doing that more as of late. Surely escapism didn’t count. If she woke before him, though, he didn’t mind the idea of her waking him up in the morning. It wasn’t like he slept in the nude or anything.

“Goodnight,” he said quietly, postponing getting dressed until she was properly gone so he could watch her leave. When the door shut properly, Rémi got into his sleeping clothes and fell into his bed flat on his back. He exhaled slowly, eyes staring out past the window in the ceiling and out into the starry sky. He imagined floating out there, thoughts of his friend drifting with him.

/end