Littered London With Lonely Hearts

@caerus | OUTFIT

The first snow of the year was always Remy’s favorite.

Standing in the middle of the Transfiguration Courtyard, she held out her hand, catching a snowflake on the tip of her glove. It was cleansing. When snow fell, it was as if the entire world was being wrapped in a blanket of stark white, it’s insides unknown to the outside world. The snow was beautiful, calming, and even in some instances, dangerous. Maybe that was the reason she liked it so much. Looking up, Remy stared as the flakes started to fall more quickly. There was already quite a few centimeters of snow on the ground but she knew that by nightfall, they could have plenty more. It was beautiful, it was perfect, and it was precisely the wrong time to be outside on the lawn. Staring up into the clouds above, Remy didn’t realize that the class change had let out until it was too late. Students of all years poured out into the courtyard, talking loudly about the first snowfall of the year. Some of them began playing in the snow; reaching down to form snowballs to throw at each other or to attempt a snowman.

Remy jerked back when someone got too close to her oxford heels. She glared at the young Hufflepuff girl, pursing her lips as she took a few steps backwards. “Watch where you put that stuff, won’t you,” she said, annoyance thick in her speech. The girl hardly even seemed to notice, the obvious excitement of the first-fallen snow obvious in the fact that she had just slammed a snowballl into another girl’s face. “Ah so mature, aren’t we,” Remy whispered under her breath, kicking up a bit of snow as she walked away from the pair.

Her eyes were seeking out some of her girls, but there were very few silver and emerald ties around the courtyard. Rem almost wondered if she had missing a house meeting because she had ducked out of class a few minutes early. Then again, did it really matter? Did she need Potions to go into journalism? Surely, not. Sitting on the half-wall near the edge of the courtyard, Remy had the perfect view of all the giddy little children and their new snow toys. It would do, for now. She could spend a few minutes here, watching the circus that had come to town before she would need to retreat to the Great Hall for some hot chocolate and a stint by the fire. But for now, she was perfectly content to pass judgement on everyone around her. “Pathetic,” She mumbled as she leaned back, now taking in each and every one of them with the same intensity as if she were watching a Quidditch path.

OH, THE WINTER WINDS

OUTFIT

Every time it snowed for the first time, everyone acted like they had never seen it before in their lives. Like the concept of frozen water vapor falling to the ground was something they’d never even contemplated before, let alone seen every single year. He wasn’t a scrooge. He liked the snow too, he loved Christmas as much as the next person. Winter was probably his favorite time of the year, and not just because his birthday was in January. He had no problem with snow—enjoyed a good snowball fight if he was in the mood for it, even. Not that he would admit that to just anyone, but it was true. If the situation called for it, he thought it was rather fun to chuck snowballs at people and try to make a good fort. But what he couldn’t understand was people acting like they had never seen snow before. They had. Unless they had transferred in from South Africa or the Sahara bloody Desert, they had seen snow before and they just looked ridiculous acting like they hadn’t. Still, he wasn’t surprised by it. It was the same every year. They all acted like it was some new concept to them, until they got tired of it. Then he’d just hear everyone bitching about the snow, particularly when having to make the trek down to the greenhouses. That was just how it worked. The novelty would wear off, and then everyone would start being annoyed by the snow and the inconveniences it brought.

Caerus was never really annoyed by snow. It didn’t bother him too much. He didn’t mind the cold, and he thought it presented a challenge in Quidditch matches. He wasn’t going to complain about that—easy games weren’t nearly as fun, and that was just a fact. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy a game in perfect weather conditions, because then they were truly focused on skill and not hindered by snow and cold, but sometimes that added challenge just made everything more interesting. If someone said otherwise, then he just thought they weren’t up for something difficult, that they just wanted an easy match. Shame, really, but that was their choice. Caerus just didn’t think that something that easy was as much fun. But he didn’t have to think about Quidditch just then. They had won their first match up against Slytherin—a damn surprise if he’d ever seen one, and pure luck if he was being completely honest. Having U-Jin Kim on their team was almost ridiculous. That was like if they had someone on their team on a national team. It was an unfair advantage. He was nearly prepared to argue that to try to get his way, but they’d won the match just due to chance and good luck really. Their next match would be against Gryffindor—which to him, would be easier. But that wasn’t until the twenty-fifth. The next match was just Slytherin and Hufflepuff and he thought everyone knew how that was going to go.

Having no match this weekend meant more time to practice, and do whatever else he wanted to do. Being a prefect meant that he had to keep some activities that he enjoyed… more private. Not that he would have advertised them anyhow. Prefect or not, his father would never let him hear the end of it if he got into too much trouble here. It was why he’d been pretty damn pleased with himself when he’d been made prefect this year. Before this, there had been no competition with LJ. His mum had been the deputy head, but since he’d gotten head boy, there was an open spot. There were other options—those that actually followed the rules properly, but he did just fine. No one ever saw him doing anything he shouldn’t be, at least, and he was good at enforcing the rules. When he wanted to, at least. With nothing to do for a little while though, he figured he might as well take advantage of the first snow… get used to the idiots acting like they’d never seen it before, because they’d get used to it soon enough and then they’d have flying snowballs and snowmen all over the damn place. What he hadn’t expected when he headed out into the courtyard was to see Remy, but seeing the Slytherin was always a welcome surprise. They’d used to have… fun together, and now he considered her his friend. She told it how it was… to the point of making younger students cry sometimes, which was just an added benefit. “Enjoying the snow, Rem?” He asked, with an amused grin as he stopped next to her.

Remington Monroe looked down on a vast majority of students who attended Hogwarts. She supposed it had a lot to do with her parentage. Her mother and father had both been Death Eaters during the Wizarding Wars and she had been given up for adoption at a very early age, having been born to her mother in Azkaban. It didn’t take her long to discover who her parents were and, once she found out, she fixated on what she could do to make them proud. Her mother always told her that secrets were power, so Remy had made that her currency. She traded other people’s secrets for information and then exploited them all at her earliest connivence.

She had aspirations, of course, that far outmatched her parents’. She didn’t want to just be a pawn in someone else’s game and she certainly had no aspirations of becoming a Death Eater, or anything of the sort. No, Remy wanted to create a new sort of game. She wanted to run the dirtiest gossip column that the Wizarding World had ever seen. She wanted regimes to fall because of the information that she turned up. Oh the drama of it all! Of course, for right now, she would settled for a scandal surrounding the school’s Quidditch teams. She had been onto a story about the Ravenclaw Beaters using hexed Bludgers, but AJ Macmillan had broken the case before she could.

She was so caught up in watching the students run amok that she hardly noticed Caerus had snuck up next to her until he spoke. It didn’t take but a word for her to realize who it was. The edges of her lips curled slightly into a smirk. He was always delightful company. Even more so when they had been a bit younger. He had been her first real…well, she was hesitant to call him boyfriend because they’d determined that it was much better for them to just be friends and shag. “Oh thank Merlin,” Remy said as she snaked her hand into the crook of Caerus’ arm. She didn’t even bother to look over at him. “You’re the only sane person in this bloody school. Look at them all,” she said nodding towards the younger students in the courtyard. “They act like they’ve never seen snow.”

She turned to look at him and smiled, fully. He always brought something out in her that she couldn’t quite explain. Perhaps it was the fact that he never tried to make her be anything other than what she was. He accepted her. “Shame about the story Macmillan broke about your Beaters in The Advocate. Probably fiction, though. I’m sure you would never cheat in your favorite game. Macmillan’s an arse for trying to frame you,” She nudged him with her shoulder playfully before giving his elbow a squeeze with her gloved fingers. He never had to know that she had been the one pursuing the story in the first place. “How are you, by the way? I feel like we’ve been avoiding each other.” She looked back over the courtyard like a Queen with her very handsome King on her arm.

Thus far, what he found to be most interesting about the start of the Quidditch seasons were the low blows that the Gryffindor captain was prepared to make in order to make his shoddy team look better. They were just two matches in so far—Ravenclaw had won their first, to Slytherin, no less, and with Kim playing as seeker, that was no easy feat. And Gryffindor had lost their first match… to Hufflepuff. And there had been a recent release of The Advocate, where Macmillan had dropped a story about them using hexed bludgers. It said a lot about him, more than anything else. He was clearly threatened. His team… wasn’t the stronger team this year, and he thought that writing stories in The Advocate was going to help his case. It wasn’t going to. They were going to crush Gryffindor when they played them, and he thought that LJ would have a non-hexed bludger with AJ’s name on it when it happened. He was quite certain of that. But Caerus wasn’t worried about their chances this year.

He could admit that there were… questionable choices, with a third year as their starting seeker, but he’d pulled out a win last match. And they all had to start sometime—it was just hard to put that much faith in such a young player. Wasn’t necessarily fair, since they’d all been that young, at some point, but still. He was competitive. Putting the match in the hands of a thirteen-year-old was difficult, even if he was good. It didn’t mean he had to like it… or his broom. Hell, Caerus was tempted to buy him a new one himself, or at least lend him one. Something that made their chances just a little bit better. It was something to consider, a little bit. He thought that he could play it off. Some people didn’t take well to gifts that made it seem like someone was pitying them, or feeling sorry for them—but that broom was awful. He was surprised that cobwebs didn’t come off of it every time the boy flew on it. He could always buy himself a new broom, and then ask the seeker if he wanted to borrow his old one. He thought he could figure it out, if he put his mind to it.

Caerus wasn’t sure how well they would fair against Slytherin the next time they played them, anyhow. Kim was good. He didn’t know if they’d get so lucky as to beat them a second time around, since U-Jin was… Caerus wasn’t sure if he was a professional in magical Korea, but he was something. It was an advantage Slytherin had that he wasn’t sure they would fare well again when they had to play them again in the spring. He was just glad they’d have decent weather conditions, at the very least. Snow always made a match harder, and they more than likely wouldn’t have to deal with that in the spring. There was still a chance they would, obviously, but there was a better chance of having weather that would be easier to deal with. By then, maybe Westwood would have a better broom, and the odds would even out a little. Maybe they’d pull out a win again. He didn’t think that it was impossible. What he absolutely knew was possible, however, was Ravenclaw demolishing Gryffindor when they played them.

After the stunt that Macmillan pulled, it was a necessity. Caerus smirked as Remy spoke again, taking a second to look out at everyone in the courtyard. There was no better way of putting it… they really were acting like they had never seen snow before. Or at least they all became five-year-olds again. “Give it a month and they’ll be complaining about the cold.” It was the same every year—the snow lost its ‘beauty and wonder’ eventually, and then everyone started bitching about how cold it was. Caerus thought it was just how it worked at this point… it really was pretty unsurprising. When she turned to face him, he raised his eyebrows at her, but a scowl crossed his features for a moment once she spoke. “Just made himself look like an arse making up stories so no one realizes his team’s shit.” He thought just about everyone saw straight through it. He was the captain of the Gryffindor team, writing articles talking badly about other teams. It was completely transparent. LJ didn’t like cheating… he was probably the captain least likely to condone it. “That’s what happens when you’re down in the dungeons and I’m in the towers…” He said, shaking his head. It would have been easier to see each other if he was a Slytherin or her a Ravenclaw, and them being in different years meant they never saw each other in classes either. She had The Advocate, he his prefect duties and Quidditch—they both kept busy while they were in school.

Remington still wasn’t over the slight that AJ had pulled. Stealing a story was one thing, but stealing the front-page story out from under her was blasphemy. Everyone knew that Remington dealt in rumors and gossip and everyone knew that The Advocate was her baby. Well, apparently everyone except AJ. She gritted her teeth, her fingertips pressing into the ledge of the half-wall that they were perched against. She was still mad — and she wasn’t sure that she would be able to get over it. There was a part of her that was plotting just how she was going to take Macmillan down next issue. But, there was a silver lining…a very small, very thin silver lining: Caerus was cross with the Gryffindor boy and not her. She smirked, a little bit of good always seemed to come out of the bad for her.

“Always do. They’re fickle little beasts these younger years,” She said, her eyes watching as a couple stole a snog in the corner. She rolled her eyes, Honestly, did they think that no one could see them? It was a small shower of snow…not an iron wall. Turning her gaze from them, she looked at a few Hufflepuff girls who were busy throwing snowballs at each other. Her eye caught a Gryffindor pair that were making snow angels. Merlin’s beard, she thought…there was no inter-house rivalry! Had Macmillan’s words fallen on deaf ears? Perhaps it was just his horrible writing that hadn’t caused any sense of house-to-house loathing. Remy shook her head — if she had been the writer, she knew that the houses would be tearing themselves apart.

It really was a shame that she and Caerus weren’t in the same house. There were days when Remy saw a lot of their personality traits meshing — they were more similar than they were different. But he was right, she was a snake and he a raven. “You should have been a Slytherin, you know,” Remy said as she pulled the edge of her glove up towards her wrist, making sure that it was secure. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about taking time out of our busy schedules to see each other. Plus you’re more ambitious then you give yourself credit for.” She leaned down, her fingers crunching around some of the snow as she quickly packed it into a ball. As childish as she thought all of them were for playing in the snow, she was bored of watching them all so happy. She wanted drama…she wanted a full-blow Montagues versus Capulets fight. And she knew just how to get her way. Raising the snow ball with one hand and her wand with the other, she flicked her wrist, “Wingardium Leviosa,” she whispered, watching as the ball levitated a few inches above her gloved hand.

“Alright, Nott. Who’s it going to be? Who should we pit against each other today?” She mused aloud, moving the ball slowly as to not draw attention to herself. The possibilities were endless, Remy just had to time it right. If she could make the younger years think that someone else had thrown the snowball, they could witness a full-blown blood — er, snow — bath. It would be the most exciting thing that happened all week. “I’m bored. Shall I throw it at the Ravenclaws and make it look like the Gryffindors? Hufflepuffs and make it look like the Slytherins?”

Caerus didn't mind the snow, really. He liked it well enough. It made Quidditch matches a little bit challenging, but he didn't consider that to be a bad thing in the slightest. Anyone who was afraid of a challenge, afraid of some bad weather, clearly wasn't as good at the sport as they claimed to be. He'd play in the snow, in the wind, in the thunder and lightning. It made no difference to him. Did he prefer flying in the summer, with perfect weather? Sure, if he was just flying. If he wanted to relax. But if it was Quidditch, then he didn't care about the weather. He didn't consider it to make it too challenging. It was just another factor that always needed to be weighed, that always needed to be taken into consideration. That was the way that he saw it, anyway. So he didn't mind when the snow started up, he didn't mind the cold. But it was always a little ridiculous to see how the rest of his classmates reacted to it each year. Every first snow, it was really as if they had never seen snow before in their lives. Like it was just a completely foreign concept to them, which was a little absurd.

It was still just snow. If he was in the right kind of mood, he could involve himself in a snowball fight. They could be amusing enough, especially with a lot of people participating. But the rest of the time, he just went on with his day as if it wasn't snowing. He didn't stop in courtyards to make snow angels or build snowmen. That just wasn't something that he thought to do. And as much as everyone was enjoying this snow, he knew that it would be only a matter of time before they were complaining about the cold and wishing for spring. It was just how it always was. "'Course they are. We were never like that though." He said, with a grin. It was honestly hard to remember ever being like that, or ever even being a first year at this place. It hadn't been too long ago, but it felt like ages. Now he was in his last year at Hogwarts, and Remy was nearly done too. It was hard to believe that he was this close to graduating. He knew that he should figure out what he wanted to do after graduation, but he still wasn't quite sure.

And there was still time. He didn't think that he necessarily needed to figure it out right now anyway. There were months until the end of the year, and he was prepared to do well enough on his NEWTs to keep any door open for him that he might want to pursue in the future. That was a responsible enough decision, in his opinion. But he didn't have to even worry about NEWTs for ages now. Even then, he had always been a good test taker, and wasn't all that concerned about them to begin with. "Yes, well. Ophion beat me to it, and you know I like to stand out." It was a joke, obviously, but his older brother hadI been a Slytherin, and he wasn't the same as his brother. What better way to prove that than to be a Ravenclaw? He liked the house too. There were some days that he did feel like far more of a Ravenclaw than a Slytherin, and others where he thought that he hadn't made the right decision in wanting to be a Ravenclaw. Regardless, there was no changing that either way.

He wasn't sure that he'd have the friends he did if he'd been in another house-LJ would have been his competition in Quidditch, more than anything else. He rather liked the way all of this turned out. Caerus watched as Remy levitated a snowball, then raised his eyebrows at her question. "Oh, I think Gryffindors, and make it look like Hufflepuffs. That's a good mix-and Gryffindors will start up a fight without question." They were the impulsive ones that would just act without thinking, and likely start up a full-fledged snowball fight without a second thought. Most Ravenclaws might roll their eyes and ignore it, some Slytherins would be annoyed, but Hufflepuffs would be good sports. That was just how they were. It was the best combination for just what Remy was looking for.