More Orla. Hopefully the next chapter will turn out a tad more exciting.
I'm curious – is my jumping around in time terribly jerky, or does it flow naturally?
Chapter Two: The Game BeginsLater, Orla couldn't say how she got through the remaining week leading up to Hogwarts without resorting to homicide, suicide, or both. Arane wasn't making any allowances for Orla's last days of freedom before school. She scolded, scowled, and sneered with the same vicious profusion.
Theo escaped the brunt of their aunt's abuse with the excuse of 'work', and Orla took to spending as much time in his rooms as possible. Even listening to Theo talk about insurance was preferable to getting the evil eye from Arane.
At last, September first arrived. Orla awoke (properly in her bed this time, she'd been too frightened of Arane the past few days to get worried about gnomes) feeling strangely exuberant. She placed the reason after a moment: after today she wouldn't have to deal with Arane until the winter break.
She bounded out of bed, smiling. Her room looked strangely bare and large without the posters she'd hung up on the walls. They had all been packed the night before, in the trunk downstairs. She threw on the pair of robes she'd left out last night and hurried downstairs, hoping to beat her aunt to breakfast.
Her luck died with a sullen croak. Arane was sitting at the kitchen table, munching on a piece of dry toast. She still wore the worn work boots she'd arrived in; Orla had never seen her with them off. Then again, she didn't really want to see Arane's bare feet.
Orla's appetite disappeared. Her mouth went dry as she caught sight of her aunt. She tried to back out of the kitchen surreptitiously, but Arane's gaze had already fixed on her. Her aunt's eyes glittered scornfully, as if daring her niece to try and run for it.
"Good morning," Orla said as calmly as she could. She walked over to the table and took a piece of toast from the plate in the center.
"I'll thank you to get your hands away from my breakfast, girl," Arane said, not bothering to return the greeting.
Orla looked from the piece of toast in her hand to the stack on the plate incredulously. She didn't see how her aunt was going to fit all of that in her stomach. Instead of saying as much, she put the piece of toast gingerly back on the teetering pile.
Arane shot her another glare, perhaps suspecting that Orla was mocking her, and went back to her breakfast. Thankful to have escaped so lightly, Orla fled out of the kitchen and back into the front hall.
Theo came down the stairs soon after Orla's encounter, rubbing his eyes and yawning. He took in Orla, sitting on her trunk with her knees drawn up under her chin, and stopped, opening his mouth.
Orla put a finger to her lips, frantically waving her other arm. Theo stared at her, but thankfully didn't say anything. She pointed in the direction of the kitchen and drew herself up haughtily, crooking her finger in front of her nose like a beak.
Understanding dawned in Theo's eyes. He crept over to her noiselessly so that they could whisper.
"The Arachnid's in the kitchen?" They'd settled upon the title as a proper one for their aunt, a subtle way of getting their revenge. Even if their aunt didn't know that they'd been insulting her, the satisfaction of doing so still remained.
Orla nodded.
"She's in a really foul mood today," she whispered back.
"Probably because she won't have anyone to torment after you leave."
"I'll thank you not to talk about me where I can hear you," Arane said.
Orla and Theo's heads shot up, their mouths open in identical Os of dismay. Their aunt was leaning against the kitchen's doorframe, her arms folded in front of her. She seemed more amused than angry, and that worried Orla much more than a good bout of righteous rage would have. Arane could delay vengeance for months while searching for the perfect punishment, and whatever form it took would indubitably be thrice as bad for the wait.
Arane opened her mouth, but she shut it again with a snap as Orla's mother swept down the stairs, looking cool and refined. Orla gulped, not missing the vicious twinkle in her aunt's eyes before Arane's distantly polite mask wiped her features clean of anger.
"Orla, darling, are you ready to leave home so soon?" she asked, pausing artfully to strike a pose on the last step.
Orla got to her feet, wishing that her mother had taken a few more minutes with her primping. She would much rather have gotten Arane's revenge over with now, rather than have to watch her every move at Hogwarts, for fear of her aunt.
She shook her head and forced a smile onto her face.
"I don't want to leave, mother," she said. "I was…" she cast around for a good reason.
"She was just making sure that Gnasher was all right," Theo supplied hurriedly.
Orla bit the inside of her cheek to keep from wincing, as both her mother and aunt stiffened.
Arane didn't do anything other than snort, mimicked by her mother with a more ladylike sniff. Her aunt's apathy frightened Orla more than her mother's silence. By all rights Arane should have sneered and said something cutting about inferior pets for inferior people. Orla thought uneasily of her aunt compiling a mental list, stockpiling slights the way dragons collected treasure.
Her father came downstairs with his robes around backwards and his tie undone, his nose still buried in a book. He adroitly maneuvered around Orla's mother, and came to a stop before her trunks, never lifting his eyes from the page. The small quill he held in his free hand, bespelled never to run out of ink, descended to scribble something in the margins.
"Archibald," Arane said, her voice pleasant. "How nice of you to join us." She looked him over, from his mismatched socks to the tag sticking out from the neck of robes, then looked over at Orla and sneered. Orla blushed, her hands balling into fists. She wished that she knew enough magic to curse her aunt into oblivion, a jinx that would leave some permanent and debilitating disease, like leprosy. True, she and Theo had often laughed about their father and his obsession with his job, but there was something very different about their gentle disparagement and Arane's cold sneer and black eyes.
Orla's mother coughed and clapped her hands together, smiling a touch too brightly.
"Why don't we head on over to the fireplace. There's a Floo station at King's Cross, I think that would be the easiest way to get there. Much more efficient than trying to hunt around for it in the Muggle station," she said.
Her husband grunted, as did Arane. Orla picked up one end of her trunk, and Theo took the other, balancing the covered jarvey cage on top. Together, they managed to lug it into the dining room, also the location of the only fireplace big enough to act as a Floo station.
Theo went first, with the trunk balanced on its narrow end beside him. A whirl of brightly hued flames later and he was gone. Then it was Orla's turn. She stepped into the fire and threw down her pinch of Floo powder, shouting out "King's Cross" as she went. The fire swirled sickeningly around her, then spat her out again.
She stumbled a bit before catching her balance, clutching the jarvey cage to her chest. Theo caught her by the forearm and gave her a grimace of sympathy. Neither of them cared for traveling by Floo, it wasn't very easy on the stomach. Once she was sure she wouldn't fall down or throw up, she put down the jarvey cage carefully, so as not to wake its inhabitant.
Around her, witches, wizards, and children bustled around the station. Every so often, flames would burst into life in one of the many grates set in the wall behind her, and another person would stumble out in varying states of disorientation.
Theo caught their mother as she came through. Wenelda's face had gone an odd, cheesy white, and she had a hand clapped to her mouth. She dealt with travel by Floo even worse than both of her children combined. Orla turned away with a wince, the sight of someone throwing up, especially her own mother, was likely to make her sick too.
Examining the crowd and fixedly ignoring the sounds of retching from behind her, she caught the edge of a conversation as two witches walked past her examining a map.
"But are you sure this is Nine and three-quarters? It doesn't seem—"
"None of the other trains were red, and you didn't have to walk through walls to get to them. Yes, I'm quite sure."
"Then where have the carriages gone? This can't be the way to get to Hogwarts if there aren't any carriages!"
They stopped and turned to face each other, folding their arms simultaneously. The map got rather wrinkled in the process, Orla noticed.
"They must have gotten rid of the carriages when the rest of the world did, 'Claw," the shorter figure explained patiently.
"But the carriages were tradition!" the one called 'Claw protested. She seemed very near tears.
Orla walked closer, intrigued. Yes, it was rude to eavesdrop, and to interrupt, but…
She cleared her throat.
Both of them whirled to face her, their hands going for their wands. Orla stared, regretting her decision to interrupt very, very badly. Two pairs of eyes, one yellow, one blue, glared down at her. They rather reminded her of how Arane looked at her, except it was twice as bad with two people doing it at the same time. She tried not to squirm.
"I… er, I think they got rid of the carriages in the eighteen hundreds," she squeaked.
The squat dog by the shorter woman's feet growled threateningly and lumbered towards Orla. At least, Orla thought it was a dog until she saw the stripes running down its back. A badger, she thought faintly, backing a way.
"Back, badger," the short woman said, confirming Orla's guess. The badger snarled in Orla's direction again, then obediently trundled back to its owner's side. Orla barely refrained from gagging. That last growl the badger had sent her way had stank of what had probably been its dinner. It smelled like something long decayed.
"This is the Hogwarts Express, though," Orla said hurriedly, pointing at the large red steam engine.
"Huh. Thanks," the shorter woman said. She glanced down at the very wrinkled map she was holding. It was upside down. "What's your name?"
Orla briefly considered giving a false name, but if these people were looking for the Hogwarts Express it made sense that they would be going to Hogwarts, though they looked too old to be students, and nobody in their right mind would hire them on as teachers. She might run into them again, and they might find out that she had lied. Besides, her mother had raised her to be polite.
"Orla Quirke," she said.
The woman bowed to her formally. Not sure of what else to do, Orla bowed back.
"I have to be going now," she said before they could introduce themselves. She most emphatically did not want to know their names. In the wizarding world, there were many things you were better off not knowing, and this seemed one of them. "Maybe I'll see you again." She very much hoped that she didn't.
She all but ran back to her trunk, arriving just in time to see her mother wipe her mouth with Theo's handkerchief. Her father stepped through the grate. He hadn't even stopped reading while in transit. The very thought of trying to read amongst the swirling vertigo of Floo travel made Orla ill. Arane came after him a moment later, not a hair out of place. Her upper lip curled in a way Orla was much too familiar with as she took in the milling masses around the platform.
"Shall we get this over with?" she drawled. She looked at her sister, who was sitting on Orla's trunk and looking very pale, with something approaching concern. All she said was, "Pull yourself together, Wenelda."
Orla scowled and wished that she dared to grab her wand and try a good old 'Incendio' on Arane's robes.
Her mother nodded and stood up, swaying slightly. Theo caught her arm and glared at Arane, who stared back at him. Theo dropped his eyes. Arane shook her head, a small, cold smile touching her lips. Their father stood by lost in his book, oblivious to the small power play that had just taken place.
"You take the luggage, I'll take my sister," Arane said, moving to take possession of Wenelda's other arm. She took it with surprising gentleness, but Orla bristled all the same. It felt like Arane was reducing Wenelda to another pack to lug along.
No matter how offended she felt, she wasn't about to argue with her aunt. She heaved up her end of the trunk and, with Theo on the other end, carried it over to the train. Their father trailed after them.
They loaded her trunk on quickly, and then there was nothing to do but stare at each other look awkward, Orla still holding the bulky cage. Well, except for Arane, who just stood and sneered at everyone impartially. Orla didn't think that her aunt could look awkward if she tried.
Their mother, who had by now recovered some of her color, was the first to step forward and hug Orla.
"Be good, and make sure to pay attention to your teachers," she said when she stepped away. Her eyes were overbright. Orla looked away, seeing one's mother cry was almost as embarrassing as seeing her throw up.
Theo just clapped her on the shoulder and grinned.
"Have fun. And don't let the spiders bite," he whispered when he leaned in to hug her. The corners of Orla's mouth twitched but she kept the smile off of her face, mindful of their aunt's presence.
Her father, to her intense surprise, actually lifted his head to say goodbye to her. She stepped forward to hug him around the waist, below the book he was already reading again.
Last was her aunt. She stared at Arane with something approaching disgust; she didn't care what her mother said, she was not hugging her aunt. Luckily, Arane was eyeing her niece with a similar expression of intense dislike. It was the one time Orla didn't mind being looked at as if she was something slimy and small that ought to be killed quickly.
She was unprepared when Arane grabbed her shoulder and led her away from the rest of the group. For a moment she stiffened, thinking that Arane meant to actually embrace her, perhaps as some twisted form of revenge. But as soon as they were a few feet away from Orla's family, Arane released her shoulder quickly and wiped her hand on her pants. Orla looked up at her aunt fearfully; she had the feeling that Arane wasn't going to tell her to have a good time.
"Now see here girl," she said sternly. "You come from a long line of pureblooded wizards, and I'm not having a lumpish little cretin like you soiling our family name. I would strongly suggest that you get into a respectable House and apply yourself to your studies. Remember, I'll be there when you come home." With that pleasant farewell over with, Arane stalked back to the rest of the family, people jumping out of her way right and left. Orla elbowed her way through the crowd in the normal fashion, wishing that if nothing else she had inherited the menacing air that made people get out of Arane's way.
The train's whistle shrilled, and its long smoke pipe began to chug out steam. Orla hopped aboard and waved to her parents one last time. She pointedly didn't look in Arane's direction, yet she couldn't help getting a glimpse of her aunt standing with her arms crossed and one foot tapping impatiently.
"Don't forget to feed Gnasher!" Theo shouted to her over the thundering chug of the engine.
Orla's sight doubled, trebled, and blurred into meaningless blots of light and color, her eyes burning with tears. They might not be very impressive, but they were her family and she loved them (exempting her aunt, of course). When she had finished wiping her eyes on her sleeve in what she hoped was a suitably nonchalant manner, her family had already left. Biting back a bit of bitterness at their swift disappearance – no doubt they had Apparated, something they had been unable to do with her along – she turned to hunt for an empty cubicle, Gnasher's cage in hand.