Only a few days had passed since the last remaining people from the arena returned to Atlantis whether as a result from their deaths inside the arena or because a “winner” was declared. Right - a winner. Somehow, Tracey doubted that Hope Mikaelson would have considered herself a winner of anything at all. She didn’t know the girl, but she still felt for her all the same. During the midst of the latter parts of the game, she’d barely been paying attention to the network but one day had checked the departure list to see Benjy Fenwick’s name on the list. It had to have been a glitch of some sort, right? He wouldn’t have left willingly only to go back to his death at the hands of Augustus Rookwood. There was no way to know for sure, but she hoped where ever he went, he would be able to find peace.
Sometimes Tracey wondered if she herself should return home. She played a part here, sure, but there were a slew of other witches with her same abilities - stronger abilities at that - who could contribute, and a big part of her missed the familiarity of home. Having Charlie, Lucian, and other friends from home was great, but Tracey missed her father, her brother, and her life of playing Quidditch on a full-time basis. She’d fought in a war once before and had nearly died because of it, so she wasn’t always keen on taking up her wand to fight another. At least that’s how she felt during moments when she was feeling down and rather homesick.
Needing a bit of home, she decided to head over to the Three Broomsticks for a drink or two. Although, she doubted she had the resolve to stick to just one or two. So what if she was late for training in the morning? They’d been on the clock for two weeks straight, and as far as she was concerned, they’d deserved an impromptu day off or two.
One butterbeer to start and a firewhisky later, and Tracey was beginning to feel a little better. She’d raised her first glass to Benjy and taken a sip in his honor. He deserved that at the very least, after all. She ordered her second firewhisky and thanked the bartender before heading back to her table. There were a handful of people around, but she caught the look of someone across the room and raised her glass with a tipsy smile. “Cheers to you, mate.”
There was a lot about living in Atlantis that was incredible to Neal and being able to have a drink at The Three Broomsticks was one of them. He’d read the Harry Potter books as a kid and had loved him, but if you’d told him he would ever meet the characters from those books or learn to play quidditch - the real thing, not the modified version college students in his world often played - he might have suggested that you were crazy.
His schedule had been busy for the last couple of weeks; even with Sam’s arrival, there were a lot of new patients to work with as they met with the survivors of the arena. After a full drink, Neal had stopped off for a drink on his way home.
Glancing up from his drink, his eyes had landed in Tracey just as she looked his way and he nodded, raising his own glass toward her. He didn’t know her well, but had made a point to familiarize himself with most of the field agents’ names and faces, at least and lifting his glass back towards hers in return only seemed polite.
“Tracey, right?” he said, getting up to move closer to her table rather than shouting across the room. “I’m Neal.”
Tracey hadn’t expected the bloke to approach her table but she wasn’t necessarily opposed to the intrusion. The buzz she was beginning to feel from the alcohol swirling through her brain probably helped quite a bit even if her mood had been on the darker side for a while. She found it difficult feeling light and at ease when the last several weeks had been hard on everyone even if she wasn’t someone who’d fought and died her way out of the arena.
Still, she could put on a charming smile and raised her glass again as he approached. “That’s me,” Tracey said and took another drink. “Pleasure, Neal.” She gave him a quick study. Her first impression was that he was the good-looking sort, if perhaps somewhat studious-looking type, but seemed friendly enough. “You’re one of the newer arrivals, yeah?”
All things considered, Tracey hadn’t been here extremely long herself, but she’d been in Atlantis long enough to know the ropes by now. And, boy, were there a lot of ropes to sort through.
Neal nodded. He offered her a smile that was friendly, if not completely at ease, because he might be Neal Caffrey’s namesake, but he certainly didn’t possess anywhere near the same level of charm. When it came to social interaction, he was more his father’s son than anything else. There was a certain degree of social awkwardness in general, but heaven help him if he ever tried to flirt.
“I’ve been here a little more than a month.” Sometimes it didn’t feel that long. Life in Atlantis had been far from boring so far, the past few weeks, especially. He had definite preferred to sillier happenings to having so many of their people stuck in a version of The Hunger Games. “What about you?”
Tracey made a slight face as she thought. Thinking had become a little harder than usual with so many events and days running together over the last few months. “I showed up at the start of autumn last year, so not quite a year.” It had been after the whole alternate universe and fake memories debacle everyone had been through. Marcus and Alicia had been in a strange yet happy relationship with one another, and magic was non-existent. At one point, Tracey had been curious how her life might have shaped up in an alternate world, but it wasn’t something she’d thought of lately.
“And how have you fared in this exciting yet quite mad at times city?” She asked him. “Any mishaps or bouts of turning into something furry? Trips down memory lane or thrown into simulations?” If he’d only been in Atlantis a month, she doubted he’d had the experience of losing someone close to him unless that person was someone from his home world. Technically the person she was raising a glass to tonight was from her home world, but she’d never met him until meeting him here and realizing they had a lot more in common than either ever knew.
Neal smiled and shook his head. “I think the strangest thing that’s happened to me personally was feeling a strange and sudden attraction for a perfect stranger on the day I arrived,” he admitted. He’d been lucky enough so far not to have been turned into anything strange. This month had been eventful, but he would have preferred to have been victim to a lot of whimsical magic over what had happened to so many others.
“What is the strangest thing that’s happened to you here?” he asked, taking a sip of his beer.
“That’s not too terrible then,” Tracey mused as she thought about the weird things that had happened to her or around her while she’d been in Atlantis. The truth was, the strangest and worst thing were one and the same. Being stuck inside her nightmares for a couple days. Most people got to pounce around in their nightmare buddy’s dreams too, but she and her buddy held many of the same fears. Thanks, Atlantis, for that. That buddy was also a big reason why she was on her second or third or… well, she wasn’t sure how many she’d had at this point.
“The streets turned into cookbooks,” She said instead, bypassing the nightmare sequence all together. “Cookbooks that tried to bite at your feet and occasionally threw eggs at you. That was definitely one of the strangest.”
“That sounds [...] challenging,” Neal admitted, shaking his head. He’d been here long enough to know that Atlantis liked to keep things interesting and why would they want something as boring as normally walkable streets. He wasn’t entire sorry he’d missed it, but he’d seen enough to not be completely surprised. His parents had also told him plenty of stories. The Atlantis motto might as well be expect the unexpected and bizarre, but he was starting to think that was part of the place’s charm.
“At least we don’t have to worry about being bored in a place like this,” he added.
“No, you’ll never be bored.” Far from boring that was for sure. Sometimes there was a little too much excitement for Tracey. Though, it was usually the particular sort of excitement that sometimes happened. Fear nightmares and meeting the man, or one of the men, her father had killed was not her type of excitement.
“Cheers to that,” Tracey said with a raise of her glass and took another drink. Hopefully this new bloke wouldn’t mind drunken ramblings and a sullen witch for company for the evening.