A/N: Taken from the Potter's Place 'Exile Challenge Prompt.' Obviously, it's not going to be entered in the contest. I just liked the idea too much to wait forever to share it. I'm going to publish two vignettes per week for the next six weeks. Depending upon how long it takes me finish it, it may be sooner.
Disclaimer: Standard spiel about all ownership belonging to JKR.
VIVAASA
by: carpetfibers
Day 2
The clerk repeats the amount due for the third time, and for the second day in a row, he pushes his entire wallet into a stranger's hands. The currency is foreign to him, the papered bills and colored coins have no equivalents in his experience. His wallet returns to him, lighter than before, and hurriedly he walks toward nowhere, the greasy meat pastie warm in his hand and his suitcase an unfamiliar heaviness in his other. The park bench finds him eventually, its worn wooden panels and chipping paint a welcomed relief. He knows this bench, he knows its location, and in this city of foreign words and people- all spoken and distributed in the language of his birth- he has nothing else to make such a claim of.
He stinks of sweat and dirt; his silk collar flutters soiled against his neck, his throat bobbing with each distasteful bite. Hunger forces him to enjoy it, to feel greed over the trite greasy meal; he devours the pastie with the greenness of an infant. He doesn't understand moderation yet, the lesson never necessary for his past life. Only two days, and already the headiness of before is a distant memory, barely strong enough to rise in resonance, to pine or grieve over.
He is paying his dues to society; he is following the justice of the people.
Night arrives too quickly, the tangled humidity of the day breaking way to the suffocating denseness of an equally thick evening. He sits and waits, not knowing what for, not knowing yet how to plan or prepare for the next day. His pride has lost itself in the past 48 hours, and unknowingly, he stares after each passing face like a man starved. He searches for the familiar, for the known, for anything that might spark a sense of possibility.
It arrives, finally, with hair tied back and lips pressed against the chilled softness of an ice cream cone.
He sees her from across the fountain, but he doesn't rise. He sits and waits, unfamiliar still with the grace of optimism, of hope. He only knows of immediacy, of fulfillment; he doesn't know what to do when faced with a prospect that might reject him. She approaches, her ice cream dribbling down the back of her hand. Absently, she wipes at it with her shirt, her quizzical gaze never leaving his.
"Malfoy," she says after a minute of staring, "are you hungry?"
He nods and remembers to breath.
She points her dwindling cone down past the park, toward a shaded sidewalk. "I'm just two blocks that way."
She pauses long enough for him to stand and gather his suitcase, her mouth concentrated on the melted mass of her cone. His chest tightens as he follows behind her, and four hours later, after a warm meal and chilled shower, as he lays sprawled on the blue couch that fills her living room, he recognizes the emotion as gratitude.
End Day 2