instead of myself; { p h i l l i p }

Billie dropped her gaze quickly, looking at their interlaced fingers instead. She still felt like she’d done the wrong thing by offering, and wanted to find a way to check that he was okay, and that they were okay. She’d sensed him pull back a little and it made her feel a little nervous, like maybe he’d regret making her his girlfriend or something. She nodded slowly, still not looking up at him as he spoke.

“If you stay at school, I’ll probably do the same thing I did last Christmas,” she said, her tone even and considered. She’d spent half of the break with him, and half with Kendrick. It had felt a little weird imposing on the Silvermans Christmas day, so that day she’d spent at school. She stroked the side of his hand slowly with her thumb. It seemed a bit pathetic, maybe, that she’d just do whatever he did, but it was also true, so she wasn’t sure how else she could say it. Billie wasn’t the kind of person who played games; with things like this, she just had to be honest.

“If you wanted to get out of school, but didn’t want to stay in the city or something, however…” She risked a glance back up at him, trying to work out whether this was a nice thing to do or if it would just alienate him more. She looked back down immediately, though. “You could always just stay there over the winter break? Regardless,” she said quickly, “If you’re not staying at school, then I’ll go home too.”

Hearing that she was planning to do the same thing as him Phillip smiled a little, that familiar warmth bubbling back up to the surface that only came out when she was around. It had always been different around Billie, but it was even more now, Phillip felt comfortable, secure even, and also excited about the possibility of what might come next. Her words pleased him so much that he started to relax a little, letting his worries about her offer fade away and he focussed on the good parts only. He wasn't going to accept the whole thing, but the idea of spending the holidays there was looking better and better. Setting one hand behind him on the rooftop he leaned back against it, able to see her better and grinned.

"If I stay there over Christmas, will you visit me?" He asked and while he wasn't angling for anything specifically, the teenager could dream. They had only just become official but he felt like they had been dating for a while. Even without the physical stuff, he'd shared things with her that he'd never share with anyone else. And that closeness was just as important as the physical stuff really, at least for Phillip. Smiling still the teenager waited for an answer, the little voice in his head telling him he was being too forward, but he'd already given the voice of doubt enough airtime for one day.

Maybe it was a bit too forward to assume that she'd do whatever he was doing at Christmas. Maybe it was a bit silly for her to assume that it was okay to say that out loud, given that it was six months away from now and they'd only made things official approximately one second ago.

Billie clung to his words, still feeling that rush of insecurity and not quite able to pinpoint where it’d come from. It made her feel tense, like she was watching too closely, reading into his every movement too deeply. The past week in particular, since they’d gone to Maidstone – and then seen each other almost every day since, even just for short dog walks or whatever – had been very precious for Billie. She really hadn’t felt anxious about it all at any point over those days. She didn’t know why she was imagining it now, but she couldn’t help but picture everything slipping out of her hands suddenly.

She tried not to let it show, though.

Would she visit him? Wasn’t the answer to that obvious? “Well,” she started, “If you wanted to see me,” she answered, a little puzzled, flicking her eyes back up to his. If he stayed at Hogwarts over the winter break, then she’d stay at school too – only because she wanted to see him. “You could come and pick me up,” she suggested.

Right now they were seeing each other every day; it had crossed her mind that the constant contact might result in him getting bored of her. But aside from that possibility she didn’t know why he thought that she wouldn’t come and visit him if he was at her old house over the break. Billie sort of assumed they’d see each other every day like they were now, only she’d be able to come over to his house, which wasn’t really something that was possible at the moment. Maybe she’d misunderstood?

"Of course I would," He responded quickly, in between her next sentence, and Phillip's thoughts about being too forward began to melt away. From the way she had answered, the look on her face, he realized they hadn't been thinking of it the same way at all. The seventeen-year-old wondered how often that happened and tried not to dwell on it for too long.

His face broke into a small smile when she brought up him picking her up, knowing how much she seemed to enjoy it, and he chuckled lightly. Being able to apparate was a big deal to Phillip. It meant freedom, it meant he had his own choices to make, it meant no one would be able to tell him to be or go anywhere unless he wanted to. He never had to stay in place, he could go where he wanted whenever he wanted. He'd been dreaming about it for the past six years, wishing for it, thinking about ways he would use it.

Being able to whisk his girlfriend away any time they wanted to see each other had been an unforeseen, but welcome, addition to those brand new possibilities. It wasn't until she had started bringing it up that it had really occurred to him. That the whole world was available to them now, they didn't have to do the same things or see the same places, over and over. He was excited to keep ticking things off the list they had made in the margin of their linked notebooks. "Deal," Phillip said shortly, a little nod of his head, as he looked back across the grasses.

"Do you want to see inside?" Well if you could call it the "inside", half of the windows were broken out and the stonework was crumbling, but somehow the frame still held together. Phillip suspected magic, some kind of warding working like a bandaid, but not really fixing anything.

Her thoughts lingered on the idea of Phillip becoming bored of her, something she really shouldn’t be thinking about considering he’d literally made things official under an hour ago. He was her boyfriend, for Merlin’s sake! She couldn’t help it, though – an insecure part of her wondered why he was even interested at all. Why her, out of all of the girls at Hogwarts? Billie knew, and trusted, that they were friends, but why was he better friends with her than his other friends? She resisted the urge to play with the necklace underneath her shirt, the pendant resting lightly against her collarbone.

Despite all of her insecurities running rife under the surface, Billie couldn’t help but smile when he said ”deal”. He didn’t talk a lot – probably not as much as she’d like, ideally. Not that she’d change a single thing about him, of course! But it was comforting all the same to hear even just a word of affirmation like that one. “Yes, of course,” Billie said. After a moment’s hesitation, the blonde leaned forward to reach for her shoes. She slipped her feet inside quickly and tied neat bows on each shoe. In all honesty, it wouldn’t have been a problem for her if he’d wanted to stay up here all afternoon, but this was his space; she would let him lead her as he would.

Phillip waited for her to finish putting her shoes back on before he slipped his hand back into hers and gave it a little squeeze. She'd probably recognize the unspoken warning by now, given how many times they had side apparated already. The summer had barely begun, but he had this strange feeling like it could go on forever. It was like hope, and he was enjoying it. Blinking a few times, he sucked in a breath and apparated them not twenty feet from the roof they had just been standing on. Sure they could have used a ladder. They could have walked to the front door, but they were magical, and what was the fun in that. Being seventeen had also increased Phillip's use of magic tenfold. While his peers used their magic for frivolous theatric things once they were finally allowed to Phillip told himself he wasn't so basic. He had convinced himself it was out of pure efficiency, because it saved time and energy, and not just because it was fun.

That was a lie.

Smiling by the time they reached the soft packed dirt path that led to the old front door of the former estate Phillip kept his hand locked with Billie's. He led them up the trail and cranked the handle sideways with some effort. When it finally unlatched, he pushed the large oak door, and it creaked. Turning to look back at her while still in the middle of the doorframe, Phillip spoke. "Just watch your step," He told her quietly, reminding himself to be careful. It was clear no one had lived in this house in ages, there wasn't really any furniture left, and no magical dust covers keeping things in good condition. Stepping into the entryway, two staircases wrapped around either side of the wall though half of the banisters were missing.

Phillip avoided crumbling tiles used to make up an intricate pattern on the foyer floor and led her through two rooms before they found the back of the building where the library was. Multiple stories of old wooden frames and crumbling books covered in dust and debris towered over them, but there were still plenty of gems to find. "Some of the books here are so old I have never heard of the wizards who wrote them," Phillip admitted abruptly, sharing information with her he'd keep to himself otherwise. It was unlike the Ravenclaw to ever admit he didn't know something, even something as trivial as the name of an author. Looking around the room until his green eyes finally landed back at her, the teenager searched her face for any sign of what she might have been thinking.

Billie held her breath just in time for him to apparate them back down to the ground. Exhaling silently, she gave him a small smile. It was something they’d only started doing, but by now side-along apparition felt like second nature. Lately, she’d wondered quite often what her life would be like when she could do magic outside of school. Perhaps she could apparate him places. Quietly, though, she preferred the way they were doing it now.

She nodded, glancing down as she crossed the threshold, her hand still neatly interlaced with his. Her pale eyes followed a pretty pattern on the tiles for a moment before she look up to survey the room they’d stepped into. The blonde took things in quietly, her imagination spinning up grand images of what the place might have looked like before time had taken its toll.

And then, the library.

“Oh,” she breathed, as if she’d just come to some kind of internal understanding. She let go of his hand to take a few steps into the room by herself, then turned around slowly to take it all in. Her eyes lingered on the spines of tattered books, the Ravenclaw in her needing to know exactly which ones he was speaking of.

“What does your uncle do, exactly?” she asked, voicing her curiosity with some hesitation. She couldn’t help but wonder why the place had been abandoned to decay slowly, and compare it to her old house on Sinnoway Isle. Was the garden overgrown there? Had the salty sea air eroded the stone walls at all? Was this what that place would look like one day? It had only been five years, but she was half convinced the whole island was a fantasy.

"That's the question, isn't it?" Phillip said sarcastically with a chuckle that wasn't often heard from him. From the looks of the estate, it seemed like his uncle must have done very little. It was a wonder the whole thing hadn't collapsed in on itself by now. And with magic, Phillip didn't entirely understand how something so grand could ever get so far into disrepair. "I asked him once," Phillip said as he took a few steps in. Phillip watched her look around, navigating through the debris and dust collected in piles on the cracked stone floor. "Technically, he is a caretaker, but I think he's really just here to keep the pests out." Phillip had never actually seen his uncle doing any kind of repairing charms. Once and a while, he'd cut the lawn or sweep the steps, but the Ravenclaw realized he wasn't fixing the place back up.

"Gnomes and pixies and stuff. We spent two hours last summer chasing a Niffler out." Shrugging slightly, the teenager finished the thought, "I don't think whoever owns the place is interested in rebuilding or anything." He had found some old photo books once, but they hadn't had any names or anything. He could tell they were old, though, which made Phillip assume no one had actively lived here in a very long time.

Taking a few more precise steps, Phillip moved to where one of his favorite bookshelves were and gestured toward it. "All of these are about Geographic Arithmancy, locational magic, and even tracing spells." He'd only gotten through the tiniest of fractions, but if she was interested, maybe they could work together to read more before they all crumbled away into nothing. "I've been working my way through them, but I haven't gotten very far," Phillip confessed, his eyes still watching her expression and trying to read it.

Nifflers too? “Ooh, I like those,” Billie said in a quiet voice. They were cute little things, after all. “Though I’m always afraid they’ll eat the earrings out of my ears or something,” she added, offering a small, self-aware smile and touching her earlobe absentmindedly. She glanced back out at one of the large shelves, her eyes flicking from spine to spine, then up to the ceiling. It felt a little like a fairytale, she thought. Like all the place needed was for a prince to kiss the princess, and the walls would magically shed the dust and decay.

She glanced back at him as he mentioned the owners of the estate, her cheeks a little pink from embarrassment as he interrupted her sillier thoughts. “Are you curious about who used to live here?” she asked. She’d wanted to say aren’t you curious, because she, herself couldn’t understand not wondering… but it wasn’t in her nature to be so forward, or to lace her own assumptions into her sentences before she even knew what the other person’s opinion was.

She followed him as he approached some of the books, a part of her wanting to reach out and touch them too. She was nervous about damaging them, though. It was a little haunting, she thought. A little scary, a little too reminiscent of the transience of things, but it was beautiful too. Even the air seemed heavy with history. She watched him speak, wondering if he felt like that too, or if he was used to being in here by now. "Oh," she said, raising her eyebrows, her expression interested. "Are they all in English?" she asked.

Phillip hadn't particularly cared for the sneaky little creature that kept stealing the shiny doorknobs, but when Billie said she liked them, his face softened some. Though he wouldn't say it out loud, he found her fear absurdly adorable and smiled when she checked her earrings subconsciously. Bringing her over to the bookshelf, Phillip was glad that he had finally brought her here. As much as he hated living in Keithcairn, he wasn't quite ready to give up this library. It was the Ravenclaw in him, really.

"I was," he answered her question soon after she'd asked it and gave it a thought before answering more. "I've seen photos and things around, but none of them have names or dates. They all look pretty old, though. There was an old trunk in one of the bedrooms with a surname on it, but I couldn't find anyone living with that name," He had found it strange at the time because the world of affluent magical families wasn't all that big. "My uncle never mentioned who he is employed by either," Phillip could have probably snooped more, spent more time investigating, but he'd always been too preoccupied with hating being here to take a moment to really look. It fitted that his curiosity would be stoked once more on what was supposed to be his very last day here.

Turning back to the books, Phillip pulled out his wand to conjure up the tiniest breeze, blowing some of the dust covering the bookends away so they could read the titles easier. "Not all. Many of them are in Latin," Naturally, "Some of them are in a Cyrillic language I don't recognize," It occurred to him then that he was finally old enough to test out some translation charms.

"Maybe we could take a few with us, my uncle will never notice."

Billie nodded slowly. When she was younger, she’d known the names of a lot of the old wizarding families of Britain – the lines that had been dead for years as well as the ones that were still alive today. Was this place owned by someone of one of those names, she wondered? It seemed likely that a place as old as this one would have been owned by a pureblood. Often, she had thought about the fact that her father’s name would die with her, and wondered if her parents might have preferred a son.

“That’s so interesting,” she said thoughtfully. This place was quite old; clearly not kept by a family with much investment in the place. Perhaps a dead family line, then, she thought distantly. Her thoughts were drifting, drawing parallels between this place and her own family's home. Between the family that had lived her and her own. She blinked as he dusted the book in front of her; how easily he’d gotten used to using magic outside of school, she thought. Once more, she wished she were older.

“Oh,” she said, stepping closer to look at the book he’d plucked from the shelf. “Have you ever tried to do a translation charm?” she asked him, her thoughts mirroring his, though she didn’t know it. Translation charms were notoriously difficult; she wondered if he’d practiced. After a moment, she smiled a little, trying to decide whether or not she should tell him something she hadn’t told him about herself before.

“Have I... ever told you I speak french, Phillip?” she asked, glancing at him briefly before turning back to the shelves, a little embarrassed for no good reason. “Probably not so well, these days,” she added hurriedly. That wasn’t entirely true, though; unlike German, which she’d still been learning, she’d grown up speaking French. And her German was still decent.

Phillip couldn't hide the smile from his face when she brought up a translation charm. "I was just thinking about that," Internally, he wondered if he'd be able to do it. He'd performed a few during a lesson the last term, and they had worked successfully, but the wizard had a feeling there was a big difference between a few straightforward paragraphs and a century-old book. Especially when he didn't know the exact language. It could have had any number of dialects, different characters that weren't even used anymore, and things to make it more complicated. There were a lot of nuances.

"Maybe I will try one out," He told her softly as he ran a finger over one of the bindings. Quietly he tried to decide which book to test it on. There was also the worry of accidentally damaging the book beyond repair and losing whatever fragile information was inside. He had to pick a book he was less interested in, at least for the first attempt.

Billie's words interrupted his process of elimination, and he turned to look at her again, "Really? I didn't know that." Phillip admitted, and it brought another thought to mind. There were so many things he didn't really know about her, big stuff and little stuff, and more than this library or Keithcairn, he was interested to learn about those things. "How did you learn?" He inquired, wondering if it was something she learned in primary school before Hogwarts or if maybe she had French-speaking relatives. Phillip waited, eager to listen.

“Maybe you could copy a passage out by hand, and practice on the parchment instead of the book?” she suggested. She didn’t want to sound too fussy, but there was something about trying out new magic on very old, fragile books that set her on edge. Perhaps it was just the Ravenclaw in her. Distantly, she wondered which house their school librarian had been in, and felt strongly that it should have been her own.

She nodded in answer to his really, relieved somehow that he hadn’t made her say anything on the spot. It didn’t seem like something he would do, but her fear of being put on the spot was irrational like that. A little self-conscious now, she straightened out the material of her dress. He commented that he hadn’t known, and she gave him a small smile; even though she’d phrased it as if there was a chance she had, Billie knew she hadn’t told him. It wasn’t as if the French language was very relevant to anything in their day to day lives.

“My parents taught me when I was very young,” she answered, running her finger tentatively down the spine of a particularly dusty, old book. Its cover had a rougher texture than she’d been expecting, but the title was still legible. “We must have spoken it a lot as I was growing up; I don’t really remember not knowing it.” She still had dreams in French sometimes, despite barely speaking it at all in the past few years. “What language would you want to learn, if it could be any of them?” she asked him, glancing his way once more.

"Hmm, that could work," Phillip said with a bit of hesitation as he remembered what the very complex symbols had looked like in the book he opened. He could barely write legibly in English, he wondered if he had the patience to copy the script correctly from one of the old books. It was absolutely the safer route, but he shrugged his shoulders at the thought. "Any chance you might want to help me with that? I can do the spell, but you know how my handwriting is..." He smiled a little at her, a playful look on his face. He'd probably written more to her these last few years than he'd ever written before.

Listening carefully, Phillip tried to think of anything he knew in French. If it was Welsh or Hindi, he'd probably heard something over the years, but he didn't really know of any part-French students at Hogwarts. He came up short as she offered up more information about her childhood. Phillip added the info to the shortlist he had been curating about her in his mind. "You can pull it from the shelf if you want?" The teenager told her as she reached for one of the books.

"I'd want to learn how to read Hieroglyphics," Phillip began as his mind ran down the list of all of the languages he'd come across in this library and in bookstores. He hated not understanding what he saw like it was some sort of secret he wasn't able to know. Anytime Phillip was told he couldn't do something, it only made him want to do it more. And that carried over to books he couldn't decipher. "I suppose I'd want to learn to speak French," He finished with another smirk because it was all too obvious why he had a sudden interest in learning that specific language.

“I can definitely help you with that,” Billie responded, the smile on her face a mixture of pleased and amused. She was always happy to help, as he knew, and her handwriting was clearly superior to his in terms of legibility. “Oh, no it’s fine,” Billie said, pulling her hand back instinctively. A sort of reverence for other people’s things was ingrained deeply in her; if she picked the book up and it fell apart in her hands, she didn’t know what she’d do. She brushed the accumulated dust off of her hands with small movements.

“Would you?” Billie asked, surprised. “Egyptian Hieroglyphics?” It wasn’t something she’d thought about; of course she’d learned about other places when she was younger, but Billie hadn’t ever travelled very far from home, and historically, her interests had been more eurocentric also. If she had the chance, she’d jump at the chance at understanding more languages than the ones she had already learned – including non-european ones – but ancient Egyptian didn’t come to mind first.

She gave him a look when he said French, but it shifted into a smile quickly enough. Billie started walking slowly down the room, her eyes skipping from book to book, hoping that he’d follow her. “I could teach you some French,” she told him over her shoulder. There was certainly something appealing about sharing a whole language with him that most of their peers didn’t speak. As far as Billie knew, French remained a fairly common second language for people from England, but she was sure most people at Hogwarts were monolingual. She wondered how foreign the idea of having language tutors as a child was to someone like Phillip.