WHO: Mon Mothma + Rowena Ravenclaw. WHEN: Late-night Wednesday. WHERE: Outside Car № 10. WHAT: Nocturnal nattering between roomies. WARNINGS: Rowena's sordid vocabulary, references to scientifically motivated pixie torment, & too much time spent dwelling on the nature of horse digestion.
It was night out.
'Out' being where it was usually night, granted, but with the thumping great monsoon of fuckery that had cobbled together to form the last week, she needed to be overly cautious with getting the details right.
Rowena Ravenclaw was not cut out for this manner of horseshit.
Which she meant literally, by the way. The stench of horseshit had never bothered her before. Ravenclaw hailed from a period in time when the horse's fragrant, swardy miasma of digested grass was a welcome respite from human waste and Muggle hygiene (or lack thereof -- she fancied the creative genius of Muggles more than just about any wizard she'd ever met, but they did often seem to believe 'hygiene' was something you said to a pally lass named Eugenia.) Horses were shady critters, better off skewered on a broach over an open fire than spending any amount of time between her thighs, but back home, back in Alba and al-Andalus, they'd had their uses. By Cailleach's quim, the smell of the beasts was exhausting her now. It was in her hair, in her skin, on her tongue.
You could cut cubes of it from the air and build a rather spiffing citadel from it if you had to.
Nevermind the rest of it: the… what had they called it? The train? Cramped and awkward, alive with people she didn't know and didn't want to know. Oh, they were an interesting lot, no doubt, if the 'net-work' was any indication. There was that cheeky priest, Andrew, with his fine palate for smut. Dorian, who may or may not have been a nymph of a variety disinclined to lounging about in brine. Bail, fine fellow, depressingly optimistic. Han? Good at not fucking up. Remy and his dubious flatbread. The boy from the twenty-first century, whose exploits outside of time still perplexed her. And more recently, the little girl, the one who reminded her so much of Helena.
Interesting all, and yes, if she could pop the batch of them in a cage and stab them with sticks until they haemorrhaged secrets and/or bits of their livers, Ravenclaw would've done it.
The tricky bit here, though, the part that squared the trickiness, was that she was on the wrong side of the lens.
How many times had she stuck a pixie under an optic glass and peered down at it with nothing more than meticulous interest in an effort to suss out how it flew without wings? How many times had she poked them and prodded them until they squealed, and cried, and blubbered? How many times had she cut one open just to see its heart beat a few more times before the end? This was, just as the woman had told her in the cage, an experiment. Everyday spent in the dust and the muck of this pestilential geography was another day spent peering up from the bottom of the glass and looking into the eyes of the scientists, the eyes that said they were all bits of fluff, nifty to keep about and poke at, but fundamentally, eminently replaceable.
Rowena didn't even have her bloody wand. Yet.
Til then, she was stuck spinning her fingers around in the cruddy air, looking like a concussed duckling while she did it. Hecate only knew what the people in her train car thought of her. Daft, that bint. Made the magic messy, too. Like trying to scribble down Ptolemy's Planispherium with your opposite hand while blindfolded and gagging on a gamy carrot.
And the dreams. Merciful...
Opening night had gone off well enough, though. She'd gone craven at the last minute near the finale, backing out on her plum (and only) idea to turn into an eagle and fly off into the rafters. (An idea she'd kept to herself, 'cause you try selling that one.) But looking at all those sallow, po-faced Muggles stacked in the rows got her dwelling on those damned dreams. She looked up at the crowd, and she couldn't focus on her transformation. The images she needed came and went, like the jeering voices in the dream, miles away and screeching in her ear at the same time.
Tomorrow, Rowena told herself. Tomorrow I'll screw my courage to the sticking point and find some balls. Somebody's bound to have a pair they're not using. Nota bene, look for knife.
But it was late. The rest of the circus had already died down. There were errant lights slooshing out of the cars and a few of the tents, but for the most part, everyone looked to be dreaming. Like she ought to be. Some sleep was better than no sleep. She raised her hand, the movement forcing the stick weeds aside like an easy breeze to cut a return path all the way to Number Ten. She was muttering something about Morpheus being a right fuck, too, before she noticed someone else was still awake.
It was a woman, small enough to be mistaken for a girl, with short hair and the kind of creepily-clear eyes that looked blue even in low light. She was lingering outside the train car, near the rusting door, looking… well, looking calm as a lamb in the blue-black dark. Lambs didn't have eyes like that, though, and Rowena slowed her approach. She was new, too. Rowena was new, but this woman was new-er.
"Can't sleep?" she asked the woman, her accent thick enough and Northern enough that even two words could've glued together a bridge that would've outlasted the pyramids of Giza.
And yes, all right, so the question was thick as a toad omelet, but Rowena wasn't exactly skilled in the art of the chinwag. You take what you can get.
"Don't blame you, really, but you do still need your sleep in this pit."