Kristmas Wish Fulfilled for: its_art
From: amand_r

Title: But a kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it
Characters/Pairings: Neville/ Lavender
Rating: X?
Kinks/Themes Included: Semi-public Sex, Dirty Talk, Est Relationship,
Other Warnings/Content: LOQUATION.
Word Count: 5580
Summary/Description: She’s thinking about kissing him again, right here in the hallway, because that’s what she should always do: kiss Neville Longbottom in every hallway, every room, every day, in every time, for the rest of her life.

Author's Notes: Desired prompt—Hanging holly in the corridors. Re: title—yeah, you know I stole that. :) Thanks, Prince, for writing Lemon Crush. Thanks, iPod for having a “repeat song” function.



All it takes is a little bitty
Of your ooh, pretty pretty.


He’s not even a professor yet, not even passed the exams, but he’s here hanging holly, pretending he’s been hired, and ignoring the looks the girls give him when he bends over to rummage in the box of plant cuttings he’s brought from the greenhouse.

He’s been growing the holly for Professor Sprout as a special treat, Lavender knows, because he’s been going out to the greenhouse every night after the students are in bed to douse it in some sort of special concoction. Now, the holly is stiff and green, with bright red berries that light up when they sense body heat. She can see all the way down the corridor he’s already decorated, the little red berries glowing, illuminating the hallway as students run under them again and again, tripping the plant’s sensors. One first year is running under a particular cutting very quickly, and the plant is flashing on and off like a car blinker. Lavender wonders if the plants will wear out eventually as they slowly dry out.

Lavender twirls the stem in two fingers. She’s got three hours before she has to report to Sybill’s rooms to help her pack the last of the old crystal balls—they’re being retired after sixty years, and a new batch is being delivered from MasterGazers, Lavender’s employer and the makers of the finest divination equipment in the Northern hemisphere. There aren’t that many, anyway—they’d been used as projectiles in the Battle for Hogwarts five years before.

She hadn’t really ever paid attention to Neville back then, she muses as she watches him bend down into the basket of trimmings again, and the seam of his trousers outlines pretty much one of the finest bums she’s seen in ages. It shouldn’t be this enticing, truth be told—she’d seen him starkers this morning in the shower before he’d left the house. But she’s been doing her best to not treat him as her partner while she’s been in the school—something about her memories of the last time she’d lived here and been a lovesick fool make her stomach queasy. Maybe she isn’t as far from the days of the past as she’d thought when she’d agreed to spend a week at the school.

“Professor Longbottom,” one of the students says, her eyes bright and a little glazed with adoration, “Did you do this yourself?”

Ah, the old ‘ask an innocent question with an obvious answer in an attempt to flatter.’ Lavender knows all the tricks of the school girl with a crush. In fact, she can’t even get jealous, which must mean that she’s matured, right?

Neville blushes, not because he’s flattered, but because he’s embarrassed to have been caught doing something clever, Lavender knows. The holly dangling from the arch that’s brushing his face glows crimson, and the girl’s breath hitches a little. Lavender takes a few more steps towards them, not enough to intervene, but enough that her movement catches the girl’s eye over Neville’s shoulder. There’s a little flare of something old, something Lavender remembers from when she used to be a student here, when her blood ran so much hotter and her mind was so much clearer, and her morals were so much more basic. Maybe something in her was more primal, too.

It was probably hormones.

“Well, I just added a few compounds,” Neville says, handing the girl a sprig of holly, its berries a luminescent bright red.

“It’s-it’s very pretty,” the girl stammers, her eyes locked to Lavender’s. “I have to go.” In a swish of robes and long brown hair, she’s gone, and Lavender feels smug. Still got it.

Neville watches her go, probably because he doesn’t know why she’s left so quickly, possibly because he didn’t follow the reason for the actual interaction in the first place. In some ways, Neville will always be Neville, forgetting his Remembrall and losing his toad and geeking out over pustules on a plant. Lavender has changed enough to appreciate that about him.

He resumes digging around in the basket, looking for just the right piece of holly to add to his growing arrangement in this corner of the hallway, and the students have scattered, presumably to classes or a snowball fight, or any number of the things they do. Lavender tries to think what she’d done when she wasn’t in class, but a great deal of it is fuzzy. She remembers gossip and snogging and make up and the like, but what had she been doing before that age? What had she and Parvati got up to when they were eleven? The mind boggles.

Neville is stretched to his full length as he affixes the holly to the wired contraptions that hold them in place. He could have used magic for the whole thing, true, but as he likes to say, just because one has graduated doesn’t mean that they’re an expert in everything, and Charms was never his strong suit. There are faint carols coming from the Great Hall, and a low murmur that means many people in one place. Rehearsals, perhaps.

Lavender closes the distance between them, putting her hands on his waist and the little bit of flesh that has been exposed as his jumper rides up, and he jumps. Her hands are probably cold. And she has come from behind. In that split second he understands that it is her, and the tense muscles of his chest and back relax a bit. His fingers and eyes never leave the holly he’s attaching to the cluster.

“You are a bad bad girl,” he murmurs, and Lavender puts away any memories of old Neville, of school Neville, because this isn’t him, and hasn’t been for years.

“I might have paid more attention in class if you had been the instructor,” she says into his ear, and to be fair it’s not precisely true because Trelawney is fascinating and not at all her cuppa, and Lockhart had been gorge but incredibly tedious when he was her teacher. Firenze is a beautiful thing, but he hadn’t appealed to her either. But Neville is tall and rangy and altogether amazing.

Plus he killed that snake. That was, well, that was just brill.

Three days after the Battle for Hogwarts, Seamus had taken over a small arsenal of fire whiskey and applied it to all those who would partake with the proud frenzy of the apostles. Lavender and the rest of the DA had joined him, minus a few notables (Harry had earned a well-deserved rest, and at that point, Lavender had understood he’d been asleep for two days, and well, George had been under the influence of a sleeping draught), hiding in the Room of Requirement, now cleared of debris and the vestiges of their siege. The room had been stacked with cushions and tables and sofas. It had also been stocked with liquor and butterbeer and boxes of tissues.

Lavender hadn’t questioned the first two until they had needed the latter, alcohol breaking down the stress of the days before until people were silent or sullen or weeping, or hysterical, or angry. Three fights had started between people who had fought side by side. Cho had had a panic attack. Seamus had been hospitalized for drinking too much, too quickly, and Ernie McMillan had tried to get Hermione to sign over the rights to her story in a nonexistent book deal.

Lavender had barely gotten out of her own trauma with Fenrir Greyback, and even now, the scars were raw and pulling at her shoulder under her jumper. She hadn’t thought about them a great deal until now, and the very idea that she hadn’t suddenly seemed odd.

Someone had brought out a radio and tuned it to a muggle station, since all the channels in the Wizarding World had converted to news stations for the time being, and someone was singing a song about ‘yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away’.

Dean Thomas and Ginny were casting spells on a few empty bottles to make them dance, and Lavender dipped her fingertips into the collar of her jumper to trace the scars there. She was sitting in the shadows on the edge, mostly because she’d retreated there after the fighting had begun, and now that it was over, she’d discovered the alcove to be comfortably cushioned and dim. Another person was there, too, but she hadn’t looked at them. The alcove invited a lack of curiosity, really.

The scars were unnaturally smooth under her fingers--if she was suspicious, she might have said preternaturally smooth—and Madam Pomfrey had been unsure about the certainty of lycanthropy, and she had pretty much waved her hand and said something about not submitting the proper paperwork, because Lavender didn’t need that horribleness in her life.

The body next to her set one empty bottle on the floor and picked up another. She heard the fwip-hiss-plink of a cap coming off and flying into the darkness. A hand held the bottle out to her, and she took it. It was butterbeer, and she was grateful for that. The Muggle lager someone had brought in was not to her taste, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to confront what lay under her psyche. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now…

“I feel like the only sane person here,” she mumbled to the person next to her. “But I can’t be.”

The body next to her moved in what was probably a shrug, but she didn’t bother to look. If they wanted to talk, they bloody well would. Fwip-hiss-plink.

“I know it’s the end of the nightmare, but it feels like… it feels like it’s not over,” she said, watching Padma dancing in front of the fire and pulling her shirt successively higher and higher until the bottoms of her breasts were showing. Lavender didn’t have the stamina to stop her. Hopefully someone would.

“Sometimes,” said the body next to her, “you wake up from a bad dream, and the feeling stays with you all day.” Neville took a swig of his drink, and when he dangled the bottle from his fingers, Lavender noticed that it said IRN-BRU. “Ruins the whole day. We’re still in that part.” He shifted so that she could see his face, the cuts and scrapes on his cheek and neck angry red, one eye mottled blue and yellow.

“You should have someone look at that up in the infirmary,” she said, pointing at his face with her bottle. The radio sounded louder in the silence. Why she had to go I don’t know she wouldn’t say.

Neville shrugged. “They have their hands full.” He waved his wand lazily and Padma’s tripped, her shirt falling back down as she landed in a pile of cushions and stayed there, giggling and wrapping herself in a fleece blanket. “Besides, I rather like the hurt.” He smiled. “Reminds me that I did something.”

Lavender watched the fire crackle a bit. The radio had switched to another song, something about if the sun in the sky refused to shine I would still be loving you. She just noticed for the first time that Professor Flitwick was perched in the corner, looking a little tipsy, or trying to look like he was a little tipsy. Just that he was there made her feel a little better. And a little younger.

“I think I’ve had enough victory party,” she said, her hand still on the scars on her collarbone. The bone itself had a little bit of a divot in it, she could feel, and maybe Madam Pomfrey would want to give her Skele-Gro to fill it out again. The memory of the claw that scraped out her bone, grinding into her flesh as it swiped by was still with her, but in a blurry, frantic image and sensation, one that left her face hot and her breath fast.

A hand closed over hers under her jumper, fingers wrapping around her own and drawing her hand from the collar. Neville’s face was close to hers, and his breath was sweet, a faint fruit smell, or maybe Droobles. He raised her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips into the palm, just holding it there, and his eyes opened a little when she bent her fingers to stroke his temple.

“You know the thing about bad days,” he said into her skin, “is that you’ll always go to sleep and have a chance for another great dream.”

He set his bottle down and reached out for her face, and when his lips finally met hers, she felt her warm face cooling, her heart slowing down, and a stillness she hadn’t known she’d been missing for three days wrapped around her. Neville’s breathing was slow and steady, his chest solid and real, his heart rhythmic and sure under her hand, as it had been all along, waiting for its time to come. For their time to come.

Now, Neville finishes fussing with the holly to the wiring and turns in her arms, his hands coming down from over his head to catch her wrists. He never squeezes—his hands always encircle hers with the looseness of bangles that she can slip out of any time, and when she tugs they fly open, because Neville knows that nothing should be forcibly restrained without good reason.

“Well, I don’t know that I’m a bad bad girl,” she whispers, reaching up to pluck one of his holly clipping from where he’s carefully arranged it. “But I am certainly poorly behaved from time to time.”

Somewhere down the hall there’s giggling, and she can see over Neville’s shoulder that a few first years are watching them, and even though there is literally nothing to see at this moment, they must sense something.

So much for trying to maintain distance in the castle.

“Don’t you have crystal balls to be installing?” Neville asks, dusting his hands and kicking the basket of holly from the center of the hallway over to the side. His face is smudged with dirt, though whether it’s from the greenhouse or from falling dust is uncertain.

Lavender pulls on one of those loose arms and backs up, into one of the narrow alcoves generally hidden from view, one of the niches she used to use as a teenager for just this purpose. The tapestry somewhat obscures them, and the portrait that hangs across the hall makes a hrumphing sound at having its view of the two of them obstructed. Talking portraits always make snogging in public more exciting, Lavender remembers.

“Not yet,” she says, running the holly across her lips. “I was thinking of the last time we were in this place together.”

With that, his eyes darken, but it’s not with desire. She can see, in the furrow of his brow, in the downturn of his mouth that he’s thinking back too far, three days before what she meant, to the time when they’d dragged bodies into the great hall from this very hallway. “Yeah.”

“You were the first one to remind me that it would pass,” she says, and when one of his hands reaches up to pull the tapestry a little more around them, despite how secure it is in its moorings, his other one travels up to her collarbone, thumb running over the exposed scar there. He’d never been afraid, she understands, she’s seen after all these years, of what that scar had meant, what it had become. She lodges the holly between her lips so that both of her hands can find his chin. “It did pass, and now we’re here.”

His eyes lighten, and she knows that he’s fast forwarded in time to that night in the Room of Requirement, and their retreat into his bedroom up in the Gryffindor tower, and the silent fucking they’d done, the rocking of the old wooden bed punctuated with crying and shivering and sobbing. And then his eyes brighten even more as he travels in his mind through all the ensuing time afterward to this moment, when he is the promise of the future and Lavender is here, alive, and making instruments that will allow future generations to see even further forward in the universe.

“Oh yeah,” he says.

“Besides,” she says, her voice dropping to a whisper around the leaf between her lips, “This might be the last time you can get away with being untoward in the corridors.” Lavender slides her hands down his neck to his collar, and then down the front of his chest, fingers reaching his waistband and slipping in around the flies to pop the top one as she pulls him further into the alcove, almost completely out of sight. He’s already hard under his denims. ”Professor.”

“Holly can be deadly if you eat it,” Neville whispers, pulling the leaf from between her lips and tracing her cheek with one of the sharper points. His body is incredibly close to hers, and all the berries on the stem light up a crimson red as the blood that Lavender can suddenly feel rushing through her face and head.

“But a kiss—“ Lavender begins, but then his mouth is on hers, and she can’t say anything else, let alone think of anything else. The fingers on Neville’s free hand wiggle into her waistband, finding the button to her denims and popping it before snagging the band of her knickers and tugging them up, so that the thin cotton wedges itself up into the folds of her labia. His face is pressed too close to hers to see but she can feel the curve of his smile on her cheek. Behind them, somewhere further down the hall, a group of children giggle. They can’t be laughing at them, though, not with this heat and obvious scandal when she rises up on tiptoe to escape the tugging. Neville just pulls higher, twisting the waistband on the tips of two fingers.

“I don’t know if I’d be able to handle the rest of that sentence,” he admits, his hair falling into his eyes and his smile lopsided because he is sheepish and confident but never cocky. And under it all he wants to be right, he wants everything to be perfectly okay, even though it often isn’t. So he jimmies his fingers down into the front of her trousers, to free her panties from where they’ve become wedged into her, and he finds her clit. His arm impossibly twisted around so that he’s palming her and his fore and middle fingers just circle again and again, pressing into her, then dipping further down to find the slickness of her and spread it about, making everything damp and amazing.

Lavender doesn’t know if Ron was ever this good of a kisser, though possibly not, and any number of other boys she’d kissed before Ron and after (though few, in that horrible seventh year that barely qualified as schooling) had never seemed to have been this interesting. Lavender likes to think that Neville had been simmering under himself for years before that final year, slowly peeling away superficial traits left behind in childhood until he stood up tall somewhere back in their fifth year.

“I don’t know if I can remember the rest of that sentence,” she breathes into his ear after the kiss is over. His hand pulls out of her trousers and he brings it to his lips, sucking in his fingers, and oh dear lord, she’s suddenly aware that they’re in the school with children about. She cocks her head a little to the side to hear better, and Neville takes the movement as an opportunity to run his slick fingers down her stretched neck and follow them with his tongue. It’s smooth and wet and the tip of his tongue presses into the jugular there, as if he wants to taste her very beating heart.

There had been a rumour going around that he and Harry Potter had both been in the running to become the chosen one. If it is true, if there but for the whim of a maniac, Neville was spared a destiny bigger than life itself, then there’s no reason for him to have been so brave, to have been so defiant, so adamant and foolish, unless those things are the very fibre of his being from the beginning, and not the result of celestial engineering.

Lavender’s thought about it a lot in the past few years: destiny and fate, the future and how much can be seen. And even if the future can be seen, it’s the interpretation that drives action. Maybe the future isn’t able to be read, but what’s inside people already that moves the world into spirals of action. Maybe the future doesn’t exist, really. A recipe for a tart isn’t a tart, and it never will be unless one does something in the present, right?

Speaking of tarts, she’s making some sort of moaning noise and her fingers wrap around Neville’s cock, but there’s barely enough room in his trousers to fist him, and he grunts and glides his hands under her jumper and bra to find her breasts. Her moans turn into a small squeal that sounds somewhat like the children, and it’s similar enough to make even her pause. “What was that spell Hermione used to use?”

Neville’s wand is in his trouser pocket still, and he pulls it out, so confident in his ability these days that he doesn’t even stare at it as we casts the spell.

“Muffliato. I have to admit now,” he says into her ear, “I’m a little nervous that someone will—“

“Pffffft,” she interrupts, pushing him into the other side of the alcove, the one entirely hidden by the tapestry. His wand lands with an audible noise, and the distance between them gives her enough room to pull his trousers down and free his cock. He hasn’t been wearing pants—pervy professor, really-- and he’s already leaking precome, and it’s hard to pull her own trousers and pants down when she has to wiggle out of them and still reach down to slide his foreskin back to rub her thumb wetly around the head of his cock, but she manages. Neville hits the wall behind him with an “oof”, and his skull connects with the stones with a thud. It’s not the worst injury he’s ever gotten in this place, Lavender is sure he would agree.

“Really,” he objects, helping her to undress one leg so that her trousers just flop free on her other leg. The fingers of his left hand graze her inner thigh and then reach up into her, hooking and tugging her close by the cunt, and she follows because oh yeah, that’s nice, to be brought close to the thing you want by the thing you want, really. She can feel her heart thudding in her chest and her face hot, and the holly is lying discarded on the floor, blazing RED ALERT RED ALERT. “That was uncalled for.”

He doesn’t mean it, but she lets him get a little rough, lifting one leg up with a hooked hand under the knee and turning them so that her back is braced against the wall. His forehead presses to hers when she uses her hands to cover his cock with the Muggle condom and guide him into her, and then he’s thrusting and she’s giggling, and he’s quiet, his eyes closed, his little concentration line on his forehead again. Thinking too hard, of course.

Lavender stops him in midstroke and his eyes open. She wants to lick his cheek, but she needs to focus here, cupping his arse with her hands and letting him work himself as far into her as possible before freezing there, and she clenches around him. His knees don’t buckle, but there’s a quick snap to them that means they could have, there could have been a fun adventure down to the floor, but he saves them and lets out some sort of groan that’s not very quiet at all. Tightening around him makes him feel larger, somehow, and when he resumes pumping, she tilt-rocks her pelvis so that the underside of his cock runs along her clit before pushing into her again.

One of his hands is still hitching up her knee, but the other one has gathered the front of her jumper into a ball and twisted, cutting her neckline into her nape, exposing her collarbones and chest and the middle of her bra. Neville bends and bites with his teeth at the shiny scars at her clavicle, her neck, her throat, bites with his teeth, just like he does every time. His breath is hot on her skin as he pumps into her, and she can feel a pressure in her clit, a small pressure like when one has to urinate.

Neville’s teeth pull at her scars, lifting her skin away from muscle and bone, but not breaking it, and it hurts, this tug, but it’s a good kind of hurt, the kind she’s taken a liking to, along with rare steak and moonless nights.

There’s a noise out in the hallway, and Neville freezes, half inside her, his mouth fastened to the hollow of her throat (she can feel him sucking on her skin and knows that he’s leaving a fantastic mark). Her hands settle on his hips, and they listen, rigid as statues.

“His basket’s here,” Pomona , no, Professor Sprout says, “so he has to be around here somewhere. Perhaps one of the classrooms?”

Neville’s eyes open when he unlatches from her skin and she can see the whites all the way around his irises. Lavender clenches around the half of cock that’s still in her, willing him not to go soft, and he mouths something wordlessly and cocks his head towards the hallways just on the other side of the tapestry. She cocks her head in the opposite direction and clenches again.

“I’ll just check these classrooms,” says a girl, a student, Lavender knows, the very student who’d been fawning over him earlier. Neville lets out a sigh, and Lavender chuckles.

“You know they can’t hear us,” she says at a normal volume. Neville shakes his head and stares at the tapestry back.

“Well, if you find him, can you tell him that he can teach this afternoon? I have a headache,” Professor Sprout says. There’s a sound of rustling as she digs in the basket of holly. “This is really rather clever,” she mutters.

Neville presses his forehead to Lavender’s shoulder so that she can’t see his face, but if she had to take bets, she’d say he was smiling. Lavender is about to give up on the whole thing when he hitches her leg again and shoves himself into her suddenly, his forehead boring into her shoulder, and she jerks the knee, kicking the tapestry. The whole thing shivers and she sucks in a breath. Neville pulls out, thrusting into her in a slow move, rolling his hips a little so that he can grind against her, and he lets go of her sweater to find her clit. His breathing is ragged by now, and when nothing happens on the other side of the tapestry, when no one pulls back the curtain to say, “AH HA!”, Lavender closes her eyes and focuses in earnest on the feel of his fingers, the press of his chest against hers, the cold stones on her bare back where her jumper has ridden up.

Neville is slow but strong, all his movements made with the surety of his intention. He’s never shallow, frantic, or shaky, even at the end, when he comes, lifting his head up and back and his final thrust presses her arse back into the stones, a few more shoves, as if he can get just a little more purchase, a little more space, like the last desperate scrapings at the bottom of the marmalade jar. Lavender hasn’t come yet, and so he stays where he is, but his hand works at her clit, he pulls out a little when he lowers her leg, and she’s effectively trapped him between her thighs. She squeezes herself tight around his hand as much as she can, pushing off against the wall to shove herself into him this time.

“If you come I’ll give you top marks,” he teases into her ear.

“If you keep talking I’ll snap it off,” she answers, whining and working against his hand, and he has to brace his feet better to resist the fall backward.

He makes an unrepentant wincing face. “So cruel.” She doesn’t have a response because he surges forward, slamming her back against the wall, his mouth taking hers, and she’s back in the Room of Requirement, tasting him for the first time, his strange bubblegum and orange taste, and it never occurred to her until now that the first time he touched her, the first time he ran his fingers along her skin in that way, the first time his breath ghosted her cheek was in the room whose job is to give one what one needs, even if they aren’t sure what that might be until they open the door.

She comes against him, her knees jerking unsteadily this time; one of her hands flails out to slap the tapestry, and it waves along like a rolling cloth ocean.

Cleaning up is always easy with magic, and it’s almost disappointing, a bit of a letdown, though Lavender reckons that she doesn’t really know what she’s missing, and post-Muggle sex could be a bother. Her clothes are back in place, his trousers are fastened, condom wrapped in tissue and tucked into a pocket. They don’t bother trying to dry the sweat, they never do, as if it’s the one thing they can wear about in the hallways as a sign that they have got randy, a little bit of a private joke that probably isn’t as private as they think.

Neville casually flips the edge of the tapestry back and lifts the Muffliato, then whistles under his breath. The student is gone, but the portrait who’d groused earlier rolls his eyes. “I hope the two of you had a good time,” he growls. Lavender ignores him.

“That whistling is a sure sign that you’ve done wrong,” she tells him, as he crouches down and runs his hands through the leftover holly in the basket. All of the berries are glowing, but they blaze up when he makes actual contact with them.

She checks her watch—she still has hours until she has to be upstairs. Perhaps she’ll go track down Firenze. Or perhaps she’ll inventory the divination books in the library, see where her company might be able to supply textbooks. She may be unsure about the actual determiners of fate, but she knows what determines her bank balance.

Neville stands, reaches out, and runs one finger down the dead center of her neck, stopping at the hollow of her throat, where she is sure there is a very red love bite, red enough to rival his basket of Christmas cheer. His eyes stare at it for a moment, as if it’s telling him his future, and he has to pay very close attention. Then his gaze returns to her eyes.

“I wouldn’t say that anything we have ever done is wrong,” he tells her, his voice low. In that lowness is an evenness, a rightness in what he means, and her stomach flips a little. She’s thinking about kissing him again, right here in the hallway, because that’s what she should always do: kiss Neville Longbottom in every hallway, every room, every day, in every time, for the rest of her life.

“Lav-Lav,” he adds then, and she punches him hard in the chest.

“Fuck off.” But she doesn’t mean it. He knows, because he picks the basket up and hefts it, even though it’s not heavy. His hair is plastered to his forehead, and his jumper is clinging to his chest in all the right places.

“Happy Christmas, you.” His mouth is quirked and he’s walking backwards now. The leftover holly berries in the basket are valentine red, and she knows that they, and everything that heat represents, is for her, if she wants it.

She does.

The scar on her chest aches. The moon won’t be full for another week, and Neville has rooms here in the castle. He’ll be there when she’s done in the Divination room, grading papers or reading, or fussing about with the plants that litter his rooms and hold as much importance as a beloved pet. She’ll put away her tools of trade and stop thinking about the future, and he’ll remind her of the past and how that’s as important and amazing, if one stops to think about what it all means. What all things can mean.

“Oi,” she calls as he rounds a corner. His head pops back into view, as if he’s balanced on one leg and bending backwards, which he might very well be. It takes her a moment to realize that his open expression contains no doubts, no fears. “I’ll see you later.”

And she means it. She means everything.

END