Pumwicket School for Practical Magic

The train started to move and, alone in their compartment, Aster grasped Jude's hand excitedly. "Finally," he said, practically bouncing in his seat, looking out the window and then back to Jude. He pulled his hat off and began unwinding his scarf. "Finally," he said again, practically singing the word.

The library was, of course, enormous, big enough to get lost in the stacks for hours.

For that reason, Jude did not just stay where he was, curled on the floor in the back corner with a book. He picked himself up, pulled his jumper straight wandered towards the doors to wait for Aster.

He looked</i> sad, eyes dark and face a little pale, stretched. Mournful, nearly.

Aster blinked awake in the darkness, shivering. He hadn't been feeling well, skipped dinner and gone to bed early - he had no idea what the time was, only knew that the room was dark. He wasn't shivering from fever, but cold - he'd kicked off his blankets while in the throes of his dream. He struggled to recall it. He and Jude, swimming in the sea...Jude pulling him under, looking at him with those seal-black eyes and he hadn't needed to breathe, had only needed Jude to sustain him...

Aster flushed in the darkness.

He started to pull the blankets up around him when a thought struck him: Why should he have to sleep alone? He peeked out his curtains - the lights were out and everyone apparently asleep. He crept out of bed, closing the curtains behind him, hugging a pillow to his chest and still shivering as he padded across the room, glancing back at Miles's before opening the curtain and peering in to Jude's bed.

After reading Jude's message, Aster packed up his bag and left the library hurriedly. He wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to spend time alone with him - and it didn't matter if he had a transfiguration exam tomorrow. He'd studied enough.

Wrapping his jacket around him - it wasn't cold, really, just cool, but a light rain was falling - he tromped through the soggy grass, grinning like a loon. If he hadn't reached the door to the greenhouse, he might have started skipping.

It was dark enough to see the stars with perfect clarity, but not late enough that he thought he'd get detention for being outside still. That was a nice thing about winter- the night swallowed the day on both sides and made the stars shine a little earlier, a little longer for the time he spent awake.

Bundled up in a heavy wool coat, Aeschylus stretched on the grass, trying to relieve some of the tightness in his body without releasing too much. Back arched, toes pointed, fingers knitted together and stretched over his head. With a sigh, he relaxed and slid his folded arms under his head.

Aster had been thinking a lot about the dance he'd shared with Jude at the Halloween ball. He wasn't sure what to think about it, and he really wasn't thinking anything too specific, really, just how nice it had been in purely physical sense, how much he'd enjoyed it, what a nice person Jude was in general and the interesting fact of his general naivety.

Okay, so it had started getting pretty specific.

To distract himself from reading too much into things, he'd gone to the greenhouse to do some work, even though he instinctively knew there was a good chance he could run into Jude there. As good as, well, the dorm they shared. Only, well, there were no roommates, in the greenhouse.

He had his wand out, but he was really only using it to water various plants. He didn't trust himself with more than that. His hair was pulled back, the sleeves of his jumper pushed up to the elbows, and he was pretty much lost in his own world. He didn't even hear the door open.

The Prewett Memorial Auditorium was done up in a charming array of crepe, paper ghosts, and tables full of cookies and sandwiches. Mafalda had staked out the punch, just to make sure -- Lockhart had decided, after he gave a little speech and gave everyone their new PUDJE, start the dancing.

The Auditorium used to be a ball room; now it had a little raised wooden platform on one end and a mediocre sound system. It was given over to the Music Appreciation Society tonight so they could play a few tunes to dance to.

The professors wandered in and out of the students' crowds, but mostly kept to themselves. It was, well, as festive as Pumwicket ever got.