The thing about Aurelia Figg was everything. She had that white-blonde hair and clear eyes; she was a lightning strike on long legs. She walked into a room and, every time, paused and captured the angle of every jaw in the room, caught the eyes of every person, and then stuck her nose in the air and—
laughed.
She had spiders crawling through her pillows, but she let them weave their webs at the top of the posts on the four-poster bed. She found owls, wings broken, on the edge of the Forbidden Forest and took them to the groundskeeper, Rubeus Hagrid, to repair; she never stayed, just left them, but always said, "That was enough."
Homeless muggles screaming about the Apocolypse followed her through muggle London, finally quieted except for their heavy breathing trailing her down the street; crackpot wizards who escaped from Mungo's (the fifth ward) found her and gave her petal-less daisies, sunflowers edged brown at their happy tips, and pears with their mossy green skin bruised; and, well… wizard boys like Xenophilius Lovegood were hooked for as long as he or she kept living, kept breathing, or maybe longer.
He followed her, tried to be quiet in the way that fifteen-year-old boys can't be around fifteen-year-old girls. He hid behind the Hogwarts gargoyles with their stone bulk and peeked at her and the crisp edges of her robes on her long, thin frame. He saw when she mixed the ingredients in Potions wrong, on purpose, to see if something new would happen. He watched her across the Ravenclaw Common Room, enjoyed the way she laughed with her friends in a way not many did: head back, pointed nose in the air, the sharp, white edges of her teeth obvious even across the room.
"Xeno, are you still alive?" Orpheus Belby asked, and he knocked Xeno's orange quill from his hands.
Xeno blinked and looked away from Aurelia to glance at the orange ink streaking indecently across his flier. It was on spider-pig hybrids that flew into the Hogwarts windows, frequently breathing bad dreams into the ears of the Hogwarts populace, and he'd been working on it for three hours from the same vantage point: in the hollowed out corner of the tower, tucked in tightly against the wall and stained glass window. It had the benefit of throwing rays of colored light onto the rice-colored parchment every time the clouds shifted, and that just around the corner he could see Aurelia.
He looked again and saw her with her hands in her hair, dragging the piano-player fingers through it. She looked so comfortable, lounging with her legs stretched out on a blue sofa in front of the fireplace, and Xeno felt his cheeks (usually so pale) redden as he thought of curling up next to her, arm thrown over her shoulders.
"You're an idiot, Xeno," Orpheus said.
"I don't know what you're talking about." He picked up his discarded quill (the most exciting thing his parents had ever given him, the only thing with color) and turned back to his paper.
Orpheus laughed and sat on the table, feet on the chair next to Xeno's. "She isn't with any one."
"I don't know what that has to do with anything." But Xeno bit at the tip of his beloved orange quill, and looked back to where she relaxed, alone but not lonely even though her friends had gone to dinner.
"You're still an idiot."
Xeno shifted in his seat and looked over to Orpheus. For Orpheus, it had to be so much easier. He was tall, muscular, played Quidditch and had the thick, sharp features that spoke of strength. And steadiness. And… sanity. His hands were large, and his features dark, and he was always taking Hogwarts girls to Hogsmeade, and whispering to them in dark corners of the Common Room until the embers in the fireplace turned to ashes, and then longer. Xeno knew; Orpheus told him.
"It's not that easy," Xeno said. He thought of himself in the mirror: muddy eyes; blonde hair lazily resting on his head; the crooked bend in his nose his mum always wanted to fix; and the way his left ear twitched back when he was lying, which was all the time.
"It's not like you're strangers. It's as easy as getting up," Orpheus said as he raised himself off the table. "Charm her pants off," Orpheus said, winked, and strolled, hands swinging, down toward the exit.
Xeno hesitated, the Common Room a dying sound of voices as students trailed down to dinner. The scratch of pens writing papers, of mouths testing spells, of tiny potions kits catching tapestries on fire, they were expiring, silencing, until all that was left was the turning of pages by the dedicated few who couldn't get a failing grade… but couldn't bother doing work until the night before, anyway.
But it was quiet, and he wasn't sure how much longer the dance of flames back and forth across a log would keep Aurelia focused. So Xeno did it: for the first time in five years, he determined he would talk to Aurelia with his purpose in mind.
Except when he stepped closer, flier on spidigs in his hands and orange quill resting on his ear, he realized he had nothing to say. So he stopped a few feet away, finally noticing the way his robes were too small (he was growing, one slow inch at a time) and that he could have brushed his teeth better. He could have tied his shoes, and maybe showing his muggle clothes underneath his robes wasn't—
"Xeno, are you alright?" Aurelia asked. He watched her pull her legs towards her chest, making room for him; he couldn't help but notice her feet were bare in the cold, her toes perfect and unpainted and quiet as they hit floor.
"Well, I just didn't know—" Xeno cleared his throat and held out the only thing he could think of: The Lurking Dangers of Spidigs, full with moving graphics (he wasn't a half-bad drawer), description, and how to protect yourself.
Aurelia looked at the page, clear eyes scanning the words before looking up. "Why do you write in orange?"
Xeno perched on the end of the couch, shrugged his shoulders hard enough to see if he could fold himself in half. But he pointed at his ear, at the orange quill peeking out between his whited-out hair (and look at that, it matched hers, he noted). "I like the quill."
Aurelia tilted her head towards him and he felt her eyes filling in the lines on his face and tracing the weak curve of his jaw. She was prettier up-close, he remembered, as if her skin became translucent and her actions more fluid, more purposeful, and they left the feeling of an Augrey whistling in the rain.
"That parchment is a load of rubbish," she said, and Xeno returned to reality.
"I think if you took the time—" he said.
"Why do you bother?" Aurelia asked.
"Bother what?"
"Bother lying," she said, and there Xeno saw it: her eyes scanned across his face, discarding the way the peach fuzz of his blonde eyebrows met in the middle, the way his bottom teeth all leaned forward over the precipice of his front lip when he smiled, and the way, even though it was winter, his cheeks were just beginning to shed summer freckles.
He saw her hold onto the image of right ear, straight, and the left tilting back, like a dog caught digging the orchids in the front yard out of the ground.
So, instead, he pulled the orange quill from behind his ear and sketched as he said, "When I was ten, Mum got tired of the family dog. Just a regular muggle dog, one I picked out in a muggle window and I begged for weeks when I was five." On the back of the spidig parchment, Xeno sketched the old family dog's bushy tail, the broad shoulders, the long muzzle, the pointed ears, and handed it to Aurelia; she took it and looked at it before looking back at him, one hand on the parchment and the other curled in her lap.
"His name was Lassie, after a famous muggle dog I read about—I know, muggle dogs are famous!" Xeno cleared his throat and stuck his orange quill behind his ear again. "So Mum got tired of him, and hit him with a curse in the backyard while Dad took me to a sweet shop. I came home and, instead, she told me she gave him away."
Xeno breathed and felt Aurelia's eyes flicker to his left ear: still straight.
"She told me she saw some nice muggles who looked like they wanted a dog, so he'd become a movie star and live a long, happy dog life. And then, before I came to Hogwarts, I dug him up in the backyard," Xeno said. His voice was flat; he wasn't confessing, he wasn't telling a big secret, but he wasn't lying, either.
Aurelia paused, considered, before she threw her long blonde hair over her shoulders. And she stood and tossed her smile to him; a jolt of lightning cut into Xeno, stopped and started his heartbeat before he remembered to return the favor.
Xeno felt silly, front teeth reaching for her in a smile, but he watched as she pocketed his drawing or maybe the parchment on spidigs—he didn't know which he wanted it to be.
And then Aurelia said, "Let's go to dinner," and that was it.
He followed.