2 January 2004
HP/BtVS




He's been walking for hours, longer than he can normally manage at a stretch.  Sweets in his pocket waiting for him to sit down.  In the Underground, perhaps.  He's learned to ride the subway, these last weeks.  It was Remus' idea.  Easier to move about unobserved; it doesn't send up a flare.

Except.  He prickles, a little.  Animal hair all over him, even when he's walking in human skin.  Those instincts don't really have anything to do with his power, because he doesn't have to use them.  They're just.  There.

"Little mouse."

"What?"

She's perched on a dustbin, just opposite the stairs to the Underground.  Very lovely girl, the kind he's never learned to look straight at.  He has to gaze sideways, under cover of his not-quite-clean-enough hair.  Look at his hands when she looks back.

"Little dormouse, sleepy thing, you've lost your tea party."

She looks at him so clearly he thinks for a minute she's one of them.  Maybe a few years older than him, so that he wouldn't remember her from school.  They sound like that when someone's kept them under Cruciatus just a bit too long.

She walks like she could be.  Swaying and not quite in a straight line.  She skips every crack in the sidewalk and hops the curb.  Stands before him on the cobbles.  One very white, very cold hand tilts his chin up, and he feels her arrange his hair.  So cold.

"Little mouse heads come off snap when you bite them."

She isn't.  Human.  Still mad, but not a wizard.  So.

He runs the only way he knows how.  Almost a block before she catches him.

Holding him up by his tail, speaking straight into his eyes.  "Poor little dormouse.  All cold and lost and the tea-set's so far away."

And.  Nothing like this, before, ever.  He's seen Sirius and Remus kiss in animal form.  His cousins have pecked him on the cheek at Christmas.  But this.  His animal-snout mouth open and her tongue licking against it.  Wet frightening kiss with her teeth as sharp as his.  Black-clad girl to rat.

Then the dark-velvet space of her coat pocket.  All her goth kit achieves at least pockets large enough to hide things.

"Miss Edith will love you so much.  Tea-time for all of us."

Empty thread bobbins in there with him.  Small bones.  Rosemary.  There's room for him.  And if she were going to eat him, she'd have done it right off.  He's almost sure.

So easy to doze with her fingers in his fur.  Black velvet cold of her, and he's not sure he's ever delighted someone this much before.


jane
btvs
harry potter