Magical Hogwarts

“No, I’m not surprised,” Clem told him, not bothering to clarify any further. She hadn’t been, really, just startled for a blip when remembering that Lionel was a Pureblood wizard and these were things (i.e. wearing robes) they tended to do. She wondered for a second if he might prefer more casual clothes, if ever given the opportunity to reinvent his wardrobe, but that was venturing dangerously into domestic territory and she still didn’t even know if he and Blythe were together.

“I–we don’t need to match.” She said shortly, feeling her cheeks heat up. She was thankful for her hood and her hair sticking out now, and for the cover of the night around them, which would (hopefully) hide her embarrassment. Stuck in her cycling trivial humiliation, Clementine had forgotten to calculate each step in the grass, and her shoes were positively muddy.

Clem was glad he said something remotely controversial so that she could resume a normal mode of conversation. “Hexed him?!” She yelped, as though he’d suggested blowing up an orphanage. “Why on earth would you have needed to damage him at all?” Her shoulders raised and she took a deep breath, scaling back when she began to remind herself of Jessalyn. There was nothing that riled her sister up more than telling her she sounded like a banshee or that she was overreacting, and Clem thought she’d react pretty similarly to that kind of criticism, so it was better not to invite it in the first place.

“Henry’s a good kitty,” Clem settled defensively and hopped onto the path next to the lake, grateful for the less-muddy conditions underfoot and for the opportunity to change the topic of conversation. That was why she’d invited him out here, anyway–to be nosy, but nosy in a productive way. She couldn’t remember when their last substantive talk had taken place.

“So,” She started, a bit shaky for her liking, “What, uh… happened? With you and Blythe.” Clunky, but it would work. Clem scratched the corner of her mouth with her fingernail and meandered backward, giving him space to step down onto the path with her.

He exhaled once in a soft semblance of a laugh. She seemed uncomfortable, but Lionel couldn't imagine any state of mind under which the insinuation wouldn't be discomfiting, at least to her. In the understanding he had, outdated as it might be, there was always something underneath her breeziest affect, perceptive, but sensitive. Perhaps that was why he'd said it, the perverse desire to get a bit of a rise, to see what it shape it would take. That it had even occurred to him to say something of the sort, though, was half a compliment to her as a person, half a consequence of the fey mood night brought, a time Lionel usually spent alone.

Her genuine outrage brought forth a genuine laugh. "Consequences," he shrugged, as if it the causal sequence was inevitable. "Like I said, wouldn't have liked to be him." Lionel couldn't relate to her affection for random animals; he was somewhat sympathetic to the idea of her feelings about her actual pets, but it didn't extend to those of her roommates.

She asked the question, and he shoved his hands in his pockets, still looking at the lake. "You mean, how did Lionel Sterling get a girlfriend? Kay thought I'd 'finally learned what a joke is' when I told him." The structure of the narrative was easy, the bones clear. It was all the shades in between that he struggled to fill in, to himself, even more to her, so he didn't. "There's not that much to tell. We started spending time together." Lionel had been drawn to her, the way she used things he understood (maths, mostly) for things he didn't (art). He cast a sideways glance at Clementine, compelled to see her reaction. "It was pretty stable, I think. Like it just fell into place." Not that there hadn't been many things he still failed to understand. "Until she, ah. Moved to New York, last month. I think...it was an easy choice, for her."

“No, I don’t mean how did you get a girlfriend,” She retorted, then lowered her voice as she went on, “I brought that idea up once, it doesn’t surprise me the thought occurred to someone else.” Clem waited a beat and her brow softened. “But that does sound like something he would say, I suppose. Git.” She shook her head sympathetically, as though she could relate, but in reality she was the sibling who doled out the majority of the teasing, not the sibling who had the unfortunate honor of being its usual recipient.

Nevertheless, @Kay Sterling  got on her nerves for reasons apart from that which were entirely unique to his own self and separate from his uncouth treatment of his brother. His arrogance, and his lack of seriousness where required, and his lack of caring. If she had to guess, Lionel and Jessalyn were both more yielding than she and Kay were–strange, how the parallels between them manifested so differently in their relationships. Not that Jessalyn would ever have any kind of relationship with Kay; she detested him.

He said it was stable and she couldn’t help her mind from wandering in the direction of if it were really that stable, you’d be together, wouldn’t you, but then she considered how long the connection between them had persisted despite many rifts and weeks, months, seasons they hadn’t spoken. Stable? Perhaps not, but it was enduring. That was still significant. She couldn’t condemn a feeling, especially if he was offering it freely and she’d been the one to ask about it.

Clementine narrowed her eyes, tongue pinned between her teeth, while he spoke. Easy decision? Surely, if they’d been serious at all, and if he was sad about her like this–he clearly was–it wouldn’t have been an easy decision. “Why d’you think that?” She asked him curiously, clarifying a moment later, “That it was easy for her, I mean. Having someone that’s a regular part of your routine disappear overnight is a big shift, even for people good with change,”

She didn’t know why she was giving this random woman the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was because she could relate, at least a little bit, to having to break up with someone. It had been the right thing to do, but it hadn’t been easy. Clementine continued pacing backward along the path, taking smaller steps than usual.

Lionel's flippant comment had been taken a bit more seriously than he had intended. He flicked his eyes in her direction, but all he could see was the shape of her hood in the night. The way she said it made it all sound like her initiative, like their cases were interchangeable, like Lionel hadn't also been leaning in when -

He frowned, digging at the dirt in two small restless strokes of his shoe, then laughed softly about Kay instead. Despite his increased goodwill towards his brothers of late, Kay was never not going to deserve that. "Far from the worst he's said about me, I'm afraid," he said, but there was no bitterness in his tone anymore.

He couldn't discern much from the look. The reflection of the moon cast watery light on their faces, but Lionel found her inscrutable. He wondered if she thought the same about him, or if she thought she knew him better. "It was stable here," he clarified. "Out of the castle...I suppose her world expanded and mine shrunk." Moving across the Atlantic would not occur to Lionel without there being some extremely specific thing to learn there. The horizons he tried to expand had always been internal ones.

How had their last conversation gone? It was so simple. Lionel hadn't even tried to argue with her. "The way she laid it out. Both of us could see that it was inevitable. It wasn't a discussion." He'd only asked her if she was sure, and gotten a soft but decisive yes in reply. The ache in his chest bloomed again, briefly, before dissipating like sunlit fog. For all he thought he had taken sufficient initiative in their relationship's beginning, he had been perfectly passive in its ending.

He shrugged, drawing his thin shoulders up, which made him look like an aging grey heron. "I always felt like her thoughts made sense but I didn't understand them. I don't regret it, though. And this outcome was likely even if she hadn't moved, I imagine." Finally realizing that Clementine was on the move, Lionel started down the path again, feeling a bit that her backwards walking made him feel like he was on a weird tour.