air [zhenya]

Conrad had been so preoccupied with everything else going on in his life -- his cousins and his parents and now Zhenya too -- that he hadn’t realised until he’d gotten back to Durmstrang that he was halfway done with his last year. He’d felt since he was twelve years old like he’d never make it this far-- he’d been so miserable every time he thought about how much more of his life he still had to suffer through -- but finally, finally, finally, he was so close to the rest of his life that he was more afraid of it than he’d ever been of anything else. It felt like standing on a ledge over everything he’d ever wanted, over absolute freedom, and all he had to do was jump.

He’d tried to take advantage of the energy that thrilled terror had given him to do some homework, but the assignment had been pretty dull, and after a while all the excitement of growing up had receded again.

It was ridiculous out here, already getting dark and far too cold to just sit still and wait for Zhenya to turn up, so he was pacing around in front of the locker rooms, his hands shoved in his pockets to keep them warm without gloves, his lips and ears going numb. He’d been running all day on a different kind of jumped-up than the mingled dread and desire -- this was just dread, heavy and sickening, that he was about to humiliate himself. He would be rotten at this -- or, God forbid, he wouldn’t be, and that would be worse. He was hopeful, though. He could barely walk toe-to-heel in a straight line.

Finally he spotted Zhenya hurrying out. He wanted to complain about having waited, but that had been his fault for being twenty minutes early, so he just stopped where he was stood and waited for her to catch up,  with his shoulders hunched around his ears -- he had brought a scarf but it had itched -- and his eyes squinting in the cold.

He had the thought as she approached that maybe he should have dressed a little nicer, like this was a date or something, instead of just wearing his uniform the way he always did (not too well.) But it was too late now -- he shifted on his feet as she approached. Was this a date? What was he supposed to say to her? Definitely not just hey, but that was all that was coming to his mind. “Hey,” he said, and then, rather formally, “How are you?”

Less formally, he leaned closer to her to lower his voice: “I don’t have a broom, has any of your family got one I can borrow or will I have to use yours?”

@Zhenya Shishkina

Zhenya had been delighted when Conrad had agreed that she could show him some simple moves on an artistic flying broom. She did not expect him to join the artistic flying club; truth be told, she was even glad he didn’t want to join as she feared she wouldn’t be able to focus on the club and teach others if she had her boyfriend around. However, she absolutely loved the idea of showing Conrad some easy positions and movements on a broom on a special date for just the two of them.

They had talked about this already a few days ago but it had taken them until today to find time to actually meet for a little flying practice. Due to the massive amount of schoolwork and training Zhenya felt constantly tired and exhausted these days but when she was with Conrad she couldn’t hide a happy smile. She felt a little embarrassed about that, but at the same time she just loved the feeling that she had when she was with him. Conrad’s presence seemed to put everything else into perspective. The stress she felt otherwise suddenly diminished when he was around, leaving her feeling light and joyous.

The girl had changed into a warm black training catsuit with an emerald green waistcoat and had tied her hair up in a ponytail. She had received a parcel with a new lip gloss this morning that tasted nicely of honey and orange. She had ordered it solely because she hoped that Conrad would like the taste of it, too. While she didn’t want to let her friend wait unnecessarily long, the girl checked her reflection in the mirror two more times before leaving.

“Conrad!” Zhenya exclaimed brightly as she jogged the last few steps towards him, smiling brightly. “I’m well, thanks,” she said, suddenly feeling strangely out of breath. It was similar to how she felt before a competition when she held her breath for too long out of nervous anticipation.

He asked about the broom and Zhenya nodded so eagerly that her ponytail bounced. “Of course,” she said, smiling widely. “You can take one of the brooms that my family donated for the club.” He had leaned closer towards her when he spoke of the broom and Zhenya felt how she blushed as she took in his scent. She licked her lips, blushing even more as she remembered the lip gloss.

“Nobody’s here,” she whispered conspiratorially as she looked him into the eyes, hoping that he got the hint. “A good chance for a proper greeting, isn’t it?” she added, feeling how her heart was beating faster now.

Zhenya took the last few steps toward him at a jog, which made Conrad want to abandon his previous urge to whine (he’d been waiting forever) in favour of uncharacteristic downplaying of his own suffering (forever wasn’t that long). Rather than do either, he rolled his neck and muttered, “Ja, good.” She was grinning at him; he pressed his lips together in an almost-smile back, then pressed his lips together in a more stressful way to fret about his lack of a broom.

“Okay,” he said dubiously. He wanted to warn her that he was crap on a broom -- that the other Sturms picked him last for pick-up games, and that he could fly fast but not well -- but she licked her lips, and he looked down at them, and then back up at her. She looked very pretty, with her hair up and her fancy flying clothes. He looked like a sloven. He hadn’t even tucked his shirt, but he figured if he tried to correct that, he’d just look like a lech as well. The best he could do was wipe his face; he gave his mouth a scrub with one hand.

She wanted him to kiss her -- Conrad wasn’t so thick he couldn’t tell that -- she had just said that nobody was here, but Conrad glanced around first anyway. Nobody was there; he bent his neck awkwardly to give her a little kiss; he opened his eyes before he pulled back.

He was bad at this -- there was no way around it. He just didn’t know how people went in for kisses -- he didn’t know how to deal with the difference in height, slight as it was, or the angle of his neck, or their noses -- he didn’t know how to make it romantic, and he didn’t know to do it without being asked first. There had to be a right way, and a right time, but he didn’t know it -- all he knew was that, somehow, so far, she hadn’t told him he was doing it wrong, which wasn’t much of a comfort when he considered that she, too, had no experience with this.

But there was nothing to do but move on, as with every other time they’d kissed, so he cleared his throat and got back to business: “So… what first?”

Zhenya couldn’t have wiped the smile off of her face even if she had wanted to. She was spending time with her boyfriend, he wanted to try out riding an artistic flying broom, they were alone. Why couldn’t it always be like this? Right now Zhenya didn’t think of schoolwork, exams, artistic flying competitions, rivalries, and didn't worry about the wellbeing of her family members. At this very moment everything was just perfect in her eyes.

Conrad agreed to take one of the brooms that were there for the artistic flying club. They were Durmstrang brooms now, sort of. Zhenya still felt like they were the property of the artistic flying school but that was not important now and not worth thinking about for more than a second.

As Conrad looked at her, Zhenya felt how she blushed. She half wished she had checked the mirror another time to make sure that everything was just as it should be. However, this was silly. She was probably looking quite presentable, and yet she nervously shifted her weight from one foot to the other and, as he wiped his mouth, she licked her lips self-consciously again.

Conrad looked around now, checking if there was really nobody there. Zhenya sometimes wondered if it would really be so bad if people knew about them. It would be easier to be open about their relationship. However, whenever that thought occurred to her she realised that nothing would be easier. If her parents found out that she was wasting her time with a boy when she could train, she'd be in trouble for sure.

They had kissed several times before - Zhenya had stopped counting how many times - and yet it felt like they were still practising. She was sure that it was possible to do better than they did. Maybe this was the athlete in her that made her be competitive about a romantic thing like a kiss.

Anyway, this kiss now ended a little too quickly for Zhenya’s taste but she assumed that was because Conrad was nervous about flying and that was fine. After all, she felt nervous, too. Admittedly, for her it was a different kind of nervousness, it was more like excitement when, probably, for an inexperienced flyer like Conrad it was rather anxiety.

“Well,” Zhenya said, turning to open the door of a small storage area where she kept the school brooms. “I’ve left my broom in the dormitory so we’ll both take one of these,” she pulled out two artistic flying brooms that were longer than she was tall. “They’re different from other brooms, obviously,” she stated, thinking that everybody was aware that they were longer and had two platforms that other brooms didn’t have. She held one of them out for Conrad to take and shouldered the other one.

“Let’s head for the middle of the Quidditch pitch,” she suggested, “then I’ll teach you how to stand on the broom and, once you feel comfortable enough, we can just fly a lap. If you like, you can hold my hand then,” she offered, beaming at him.

This was just so awkward -- Conrad was already awkward, skinny and bug-eyed and jumpy, but it was a hundred times worse with girls, a thousand times worse with Zhenya. He’d never worried this much about coming up short, before -- he’d never felt this much like he had something to prove. Not even to her, but to himself, like he might be useless at everything else but he had to be able to do this -- Zhenya -- right. It wouldn’t matter if he was bad at flying -- but it mattered that she still liked him afterward.

(Of course, it did also matter to him if he was bad at flying, for the same reason it mattered to him that he was bad at alchemy, or arithmetic, or anything else -- it didn’t seem fair how hard he had to work to be only passable -- but if he could help it, he’d never fly again. This -- girls -- Zhenya -- he had to be good at that or he’d die alone.)

He followed her to the broom closet; she’d left her own in her dormitory (he could fill in the blanks: she probably didn’t trust him with it) and resisted the urge to tell her he wasn’t stupid and stuck his hand out to accept the broom she handed him. It was taller than he was; he turned it, holding it horizontally over the grass, and tried to figure out how he was supposed to get onto it. He’d never really paid attention to that. “Do we have to go to the middle of the pitch?” he said, not moving. It seemed a lot more exposed out there -- even in the twilight he felt all too conspicuous. “I’m fine staying by the walls. If I go out of control at least I’ll run into something faster.”

Holding her hand was something else he hadn’t really decided his feelings on yet. They hadn’t tried it in public yet -- obviously -- and they didn’t have much reason to do it in private either. Conrad understood that it was another of those things that couples just did, but he couldn’t help thinking it was inconvenient. He liked having both his hands to himself, and probably would like it even more if he were trying to balance in midair on a broom.

So much for being good at this, he thought bitterly -- they’d been here for like five minutes and already he didn’t want to do anything she had asked about. Except fly a lap: that sounded exactly his speed, looping the periphery of the pitch and not doing anything fancy. More like a chore than an art. Conrad rolled his shoulders, still holding his broomstick out to his side -- “Do I have to put it down first?”

Zhenya nervously observed Conrad as he took the broom and examined it a little. He didn’t seem eager to go to the middle of the pitch and the girl felt she knew why - they’d be more visible there than if they stayed by the walls. He justified his wish not to go to the centre differently, though, and Zhenya raised her eyebrows ever so slightly.

“We can stay here for now. However, I think it’s better if there’s no obstacle to run into when you start…” She grinned a little. “You’ll do fine, don’t worry. It’s not like you have to do anything too complicated.”

It was true that what she was expecting of Conrad was not complicated at all to her. She had been standing on artistic flying brooms for most of her life. Keeping her balance was nothing difficult for her. Conrad, however, was an absolute beginner who likely had never even tried to walk straight on a beam. For him this challenge was much bigger for sure.

Conrad asked if he had to put the broom down first. Zhenya realised with some amusement that for her mounting a broom was so much of a routine that explaining it step by step felt quite strange. Well, at least he still seemed interested in trying and didn’t want to back out. That was good. She smiled at him gratefully. She had been looking forward and dreading this moment at the same time, thinking that it would not do their relationship any good if Conrad chose not to try flying, after all.

“Yes,” she said, “you can put it down and then, just like with any other broom command it ‘up’. It’ll hover just a bit above the ground and then you can mount it. You could also just drop it and hold your hand like this” She paused, dropping her broom and holding her hand parallel to the ground. Her broom hovered just a bit above the ground in an equally horizontal position.

“When you mount it, place one foot on the second platform near the tail first and then put the other foot on the front platform. If you do it the other way around the broom will sink and the handle might touch the ground before you’re on it.” She paused, wondering if she was explaining this well enough. “I’ll show you,” she added hastily, stepping onto her broom which rose slightly higher into the air before it hovered a few feet above the ground. 

“Keep your arms stretched out so it’s easier to find your balance, don’t shift your weight abruptly, and don’t move too quickly,” she advised. She had already told beginners in the artistic flying club how to mount a broom but this still felt different somehow. Zhenya tried to offer her boyfriend an encouraging smile but she was actually rather worried that something might go wrong and that it would be all her fault.

“I would rather have the wall,” Conrad said – he might not have particular experience flying into them, but he had a high opinion of his ability to absorb shocks, and he thought he could take it. But she smiled, and he mirrored the gesture with relief, hoping it didn’t look silly. He trusted Zhenya to know what was difficult and easy on one of these broomsticks, but he wasn’t sure if he could trust her to judge his coordination, which still consistently let him down after eighteen years.

He took a deep breath before he started, trying to think of the steadiest things he could, like trees and draft horses; he dropped the broom (thinking a moment later that he should probably have been more careful with it, and shooting Zhenya a guilty look) then stuck his hand out over it: “Up,” he mumbled, and it rose up and hung ominously a few inches over the frosty grass. Conrad had forgotten all his steady thoughts – he tried hastily to recall them (trees, draft horses) and then to absorb everything Zhenya was telling him (she was telling him too much at once, didn’t she know he was stupid?!) and then got on – one foot at the tail, then the other closer to the front. He stood there for a moment, hoping fervently that the broom wouldn’t move any higher or lower than it was presently, and then said, “How do I get down? Do I jump?”

That was what he wanted to do, but he couldn’t imagine it was the proper way to do it. It was just an impulse, like scratching a scab, like the natural response to standing on top of something high – as a kid he’d jumped off a lot of tall things, before it’d started making his mother nervous. He resisted the urge to take a dive now and held his arms out the way Zhenya had hers. It made him feel abominably stupid. He wished they could just skip to running into walls.

At first he’d thought he might have some kind of advantage, having spent so much time on boats. (Here was a steady thought – standing at the wheel of his father’s ketch when he was twelve, with his dad holding his hands steady when the boat hit a swell.) But a boat, he was noticing, the longer he stared at his feet on the platforms, was a good deal bigger than a broomstick, and when he fell on the boat, he didn’t generally have far to go, unless he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be. Now he did want to jump off, but he swallowed and resisted the urge, furrowing his eyebrows with concentration. “I don’t know how to make it go,” he reminded her.

Zhenya knew her boyfriend well enough by now not to take offense too easily. Sometimes it was hard, of course. Conrad didn’t mince his words and was not one to offer pleasantries. The girl, therefore, just smiled as he said that he’d rather have the wall.

“Okay,” she said, hoping that he would not end up crashing into the wall. She really didn’t want to have to bring him to the hospital wing after this. Of course, should he get injured she’d do so without the slightest hesitation but still… She’d much prefer if he would be fine after this little tryout.

From her slightly elevated position on the broom she observed Conrad as he dropped his broom and demanded it up. She gave a little nod as he stepped onto the platforms, noticing how obvious it was that he was an absolute beginner.

“Well done,” she said encouragingly anyway. He was standing on the broom, after all. It was a good start.

Frowning slightly as she heard his first question, Zhenya took a little longer than needed to respond. Conrad had mounted the broom seconds ago and the first thing he was asking was how he would get down again? She tried to hide her disappointment behind the mask of a slight smile.

“To get down you lift the foot from the platform near the tail and move it forward. As the weight shifts forward the broom will sink and then you can step off it comfortably,” she finally explained. She was still contemplating to offer that they’d try getting on and off the broom a few times so he’d feel more at ease when Conrad asked about making it go.

A relieved smile spread across her face. This clearly meant that he was still willing to try this out.

“Well,” she started, realising not for the first time when talking to beginners, how natural everything felt to her and how difficult it was to explain these things. “Bend your knees a little and lean forward a bit. You steer left, right, up, and down by shifting your weight. A lot also happens just like… a voiceless command, though? You can do voiceless incantations, right? This is pretty similar. Think of speeding up, visualise a spot to which you want to fly…” she gave a little shrug. It really was hard to explain these things.

Well done, said Zhenya; Conrad, suspicious he was being condescended to, mumbled, “Not really,” but didn’t push the point. He knew he was shitty at this – she could pretend what she wanted to.

He was definitely going to have forgotten how to dismount, by the time it became necessary, but he supposed there was also a chance he would fall off it on his own, and not need to remember, so he didn’t ask her to repeat it – if all else failed, he told himself, he would jump. It wasn’t like he was planning to go any higher than ten feet off the ground. If he was seriously hurt… well, maybe he’d get out of Survival tomorrow, maybe he’d have to go to the nurse and she would tell him he was stupid. He was five months out from graduation. He didn’t give a damn.

In theory, he knew how to do voiceless incantations. In practice, he’d tried to conjure birds in Illusions that morning and they had burst, and he had spent half his lunch scrubbing entrails off his desk. He said, “So, like a normal broom,” and leaned forward – the broom shot ahead and he instinctively launched himself off of it, tumbled over onto his knees and watched the broom stop abruptly several feet away and drop into the grass. He glanced sheepishly at Zhenya, then got up to go fetch it, mounted it with rather more ease.

Slower, you moron, he told himself, and leaned forward significantly less sharply – this time he got it moving at a more manageable pace; he waited for Zhenya on her own broom to catch up – surely that wasn’t hard for her – and said, “Now what?”

Conrad didn’t seem to accept the praise and Zhenya decided not to compliment him again unless he really did something surprisingly well. However, she thought that for someone who tried this for the first time he was not that bad.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Zhenya said when her boyfriend asked if an artistic flying broom worked like a normal broom. It did, in a way. However, artistic flying brooms reacted a little differently to normal brooms. As she watched Conrad the girl felt a little anxious. She could tell that he leaned forward a little too much for a first attempt at speeding up.

Before she could intervene, though, Conrad had already launched himself off the broom. Zhenya frowned and steered her broom towards him, feeling uncertain if she should ask him if he was okay or better keep quiet. The moment when she could have enquired passed and Conrad was already mounting the broom again.

She caught up with Conrad in an instant and a smile spread across her face. For her this felt perfect. Her boyfriend was on an artistic flying broom, clearly making an effort to get to know her sport.

“Before we try any moves on the broom you should try to shift your weight to steer the broom,” she suggested. “We could fly some patterns to practice? Just try to do what I’m doing. That way you gain some more control over the broom. Once you feel comfortable with that I could show you some simple moves on the broom.” She started to fly some soft serpentines, next to Conrad, always keeping an eye on him as she did so.

Like a normal broom. It would have been more reassuring if he were good with normal brooms, he decided as he was getting back to his feet. He still felt very stupid; he was sure he still looked very stupid too, just standing on this broom. What was he supposed to be doing with his hands? Surely not putting them in his pockets, where they’d be of no use in case of another fall; he dropped them to his sides, but gripped the excess fabric of his robes sleeves in his fists for something to hold onto.

He didn’t hate this, he decided. He didn’t like just standing, but – as Zhenya began to zig-zag gently next to him, and Conrad tried to mirror her movements and wound up with a zig-zag that was at once both much slower and much more abrupt – it wasn’t that bad just to be moving, even this slowly. It was peaceful, at least, out here under the broad grey sky in the wind, and Conrad had spent eighteen years (and a week, give or take) in pursuit of peace.

To that end, he didn’t respond for a while, until – as he was trying halfheartedly to recall her words, in case there had been something in there he was supposed to respond to – he caught, simple moves. That sounded suspiciously like artistic flying. “What do you mean as a simple move?” he said warily; he hadn’t been trying to say it with aggression, but aggression tended to leech into most of the things he said anyway and he was powerless to stop it.

“You could hold your arms outstretched to make it easier to keep your balance,” Zhenya suggested as she noticed that Conrad seemed at a loss what to do with his hands. In the artistic flying club Zhenya told her group of beginners to hold the arms outstretched and then only when they seemed to feel at ease explained to them how to use them to look graceful or to use them to support some more difficult moves.

Zhenya kept an eye on Conrad, smiling at him encouragingly and nodding as he zig-zagged with his broom. She didn’t want to voice any praise now, seeing how he would probably not take it well. He was right, of course, if she compared his moves to those of a professional athlete he did look like an absolute beginner. Even compared to the beginners who had had a few lessons on artistic flying brooms already he looked worse. However, when she thought back to the first meeting of the club there had been some students who had done worse than him.

They had been flying quietly for a while and Zhenya observed her boyfriend carefully, trying to read his expression and figure out if he felt comfortable or not when he broke the silence again responding to something she had earlier said with a question that revealed some wariness. A giggle escaped her as she wondered what he might be imagining now.

“Nothing drastic,” she explained lightly. “I was just thinking that, in order to get used to the broom, you should learn how to switch the platforms.” She did a tiny jump to demonstrate one way of doing it and, instead of her left foot now her right foot was on the front platform. “It’s good to learn this because if you fly a tight circle it is easier if you face the inside of the circle.”

Again the girl demonstrated what she was saying, flying a first small circle where she was facing the inside and a second a little larger one where with her back to the inside of the circle. Of course, as an experienced athlete she could do both but her recent experience teaching beginners had shown her that there was a noticeable different level of difficulty.

Zhenya was nodding and smiling encouragingly at him, so Conrad stopped looking at her before he could start feeling condescended to again. He focused instead on trying to lurch less. It was kind of like the opposite of being steady on a boat, when all he had to do was feel for the roll of the water and ride it out; here he had to manage his own momentum, which he thought he would like better if he were at all good at it.

Conrad had never liked to feel out of control, at the mercy of something that much greater and and more powerful and older than himself – he’d never had the knack for sailing that his father had, which his father blamed on his youth (on a good day) or his thick skull (otherwise) – but he was finding it a welcome alternative to this skidding, stuttering flight. At least it was familiar to him.

Conrad felt like he’d given this a good, decent try, by now – this was already more than he’d have done if she hadn’t seemed sort of put out by his refusal the first time – and he wanted to ask to stop, but it hadn’t even been half an hour and Zhenya probably wanted to do this for like, ages. Everybody in the world had more patience than he did (why was it that the only thing Conrad could reliably do for hours on end was nothing? Surely Zhenya would never be interested in that.)

Uneasily, he pulled himself to a stop (he stretched one hand out to catch himself against the pitch wall) and watched Zhenya do a jump. “Okay,” said Conrad – flying in a circle, whatever, though he sort of thought it would be easier to just get off the broom and get back on it backwards, and less like dancing. “Show me again, but slower.”

It was so great to be out here with Conrad. Zhenya was determined to enjoy that her boyfriend had agreed to try flying on an artistic flying broom. She tried to see the good things only - he was here with her. He was really trying. He was not giving up yet. She tried to ignore that he seemed tense, that he didn’t seem as though he’d do this more than once, that he didn’t seem to appreciate her praise even though she really meant it. Zhenya had learned in the artistic flying club that beginners weren’t good, weren’t even as good as the small children at the artistic flying school were. She appreciated every little achievement with them.

Conrad stopped by the wall, obviously unsure how else he could come to a halt. She’d teach him that but the girl knew that she should take it slowly. For now his way of stopping was sufficient.

He seemed ready to try a little more and Zhenya offered a beaming smile. Every tiny bit of interest that Conrad showed meant the world to her. The sport was her life, after all. He didn’t have to become an artistic flyer himself but she needed him to understand the sport, to see how difficult the things that she did on the broom were. She needed him to appreciate it to some degree.

“When the broom moves you can sort of… hmmm make a step forward as though you were running. So it’s like a jump forward. The broom moves and so do you…” She had the feeling that they should have practised this on a low beam as she had done with the members of the flying club. However, she was not going to tell him that now. They weren’t up high. He’d be fine even if he fell off his broom. She sped up with her broom and showed him several little jumps so that it looked as though she was running through the air, only briefly hitting the platforms to kick off again. “That’s how it can look like,” she explained before showing him more slowly how he could change the platforms. “Once you can do this we can work on flying in circles.”

Zhenya looked so pleased with him; that was the problem. Conrad thought that as long as she seemed proud of his effort, he would have to keep giving it. Eventually it would fall apart – he was already inexperienced, and suspected he was naturally untalented as well – but until it did, all he could do was anticipate it. Failure was always less devastating when he prepared for it.

Conrad pushed off the wall and drifted closer to Zhenya, then tried to mimic her motions. His right foot found the front platform; his left sank down through the air, and then the rest of him followed. He caught himself on his hands, then rubbed half-melting ice off his palms onto his robes and got back up and back on the broomstick to try again. The second time, he missed the front platform as well, and just fell hard on his ass; he flushed red and struggled up again. The third time, he hardly got to the jump before he lost his balance; the broom flew into the wall, and Conrad landed hard on the frozen turf, livid with embarrassment, sat up and punched the ground next to him just to vent some energy.

He’d almost had it, at the start – he’d been at least halfway there – but then he’d lost it, just like he’d known he would. It was always like that for him – trying only made it worse, like test answers he knew he’d studied but couldn’t remember, until he’d wasted half his time staring at the parchment; like explaining himself under pressure, until he’d talked himself into more trouble; like his father coming and tugging his knots loose and making him do it again, until he was too frustrated to think and his father was too impatient to let him keep trying.

He got to his feet and stomped off to retrieve the broom – his hands were cold and stiff, and his knees and palms and back hurt where he’d landed on them, and he was fizzing with pent-up irritation that he couldn’t put anywhere. “Up,” he snapped; the broomstick, to its credit, rose into the air at once, and he slumped against the wall next to it, waiting for Zhenya to follow him.

As soon as she was in earshot, he said quietly, not lifting his head, “I told you I wouldn’t be good at this.” He flexed his fingers to make sure they weren’t frozen stiff yet and added, “You can keep flying – I’ll just watch you and learn that way.” That one never worked with his father, but he thought Zhenya might let him get away with it.